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Three Gates on a Side 



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BY 



CHARLES H. PARKHURST, D.D. 

PASTOR OF THE MADISON SQUARE CHURCH, NEW YORK 

Author of "The Blind Man's Creed," "The Pattern on the Mount" etc. 




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Fleming H. Revell Company 

pubXigfat? of <£fcan0elicai Hiterature 

NEW YORK ' CHICAGO 

30 Union Square, East 148 & 150 Madison Street 



iTHB LIBRARY 
OF CONGRBiS 

IWAtMlWOTOK 



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Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1891, by 

FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY, 

In the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. 

All Rights Reserved. 



fji } 173 Macdougal Street, New York 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. Three Gates On a Side, Rev. xxi: 13, 5 

II. God is Spirit, John iv: 24, 19 

III. The Nerve of Religious Sensation, Prov. xx: 27, . 35 

IV. The Secret of Power, / Cor. iv: 20, 53 

V. The Garden of the Lord, Gen. Hi: 8, 69 

VI. Unconscious Faith, Gen. xxiv: 27, 84 

VII. Doing, the Means of Knowing, Gen. xxiv: 27, . . 98 

VIII. I Know Whom I Have Believed, II Tim. i: 12, . 113 

IX. The Lord Is My Shepherd, Ps. xxiii: 1, .... 127 

X. The Gadarene Preacher, Luke viii: 38, 39, ... 141 

XL The Under Man, "Matt, xxv: 40, 157 

XII. I Go A-Fishing, John xxi: 3, 171 

XIII. How Much Is a Man Better Than a Sheep? 

Matt, xii: 12. 185 

XIV. Partakers of the Divine Nature, // Peter i: 4, . 200 

XV. Defensive Armor, Eph. vi: 13-16, 212 

XVI. Christ Still Escaping from Entombment, 

Acts it: 24. 226 

XVII. Eternal Life a Present Possession, John v: 24, . 241 

XVIII. We Know in Part, / Cor, xiii: 9,10, 255 



I 

m* * v* v* 

On the East Three Gates; On the North Three 
Gates; On the South Three Gates, and on 
the West Three Gates. — Rev. xxi:13. 

rj7HREE gates on each side of the celestial quad- 
rangle. So much as to the accessibility of the 
heavenly city. So that no one coming from the 
North need go around on to the South side in order 
to get in ; no one approaching from the East need 
go around on to the West side in order to get in. 
Wherever outside of the kingdom we may any of 
us happen to be standing, we are each of us close to 
some threshold. Three gates on a side. A good 
many of us here are not in the kingdom, perhaps ; 
but the assurance that there is not one such but has 
his foot even now close to some threshold creates 
the hope and inspires the faith that some such will 
this morning enter into the kingdom. It is in pur- 
suance of that end that we speak. 

Christ is himself gateway impersonated — what 
Scripture calls "open door." That fact is familiar; 
but our particular matter this morning is that he is 
not simply one open door to which we all of us have 

(5) 



THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 



to come in order to enter, but that he is himself a 
good many open doors, one of which is cut in the 
wall immediately in front of each of us to let us 
enter. Three gates in each wall. Christ is not only 
one gate — he is all the gates ; and his multiplicity 
matches our diversity. So that each man to be 
saved will be saved by his own particular Christ, and 
enter the kingdom through his own special, private 
portal. 

In reading the narrative of Christ's early dealings 
with the people he moved among, you have prob- 
ably remarked what a variety of note he struck in 
order to hit the music that was in each ear. The 
sick believed in him because he healed them ; the 
blind, because he gave them new eyes; the hungry, 
because he procured them bread ; the thirsty, because 
he made them wine ; the discouraged, because he 
brought them a new hope ; the wicked, because he 
forgave them. He conducted men to God, but he 
was all kinds of open doors for them to go through, 
and a separate door for each particular one of them 
to go through — like a mirror that answers for every 
face ; like an organ that sufficeth'for every tune. | 

And men have still their own special Christ. He 
is as various as the men are various that believe in 
him. We believe in the same Christ, and yet we 
have not the same belief in Christ ; like two men 
standing on the opposite side of a hill, who have a 
view of the same hill, but not the same view 



THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 



of the hill. We are in that respect like dif- 
ferent kinds of flowers growing out in the sun- 
shine ; one flower, when it is touched by white light, 
will extract from the white light one particular tint, 
another flower will extract another particular tint 
from the same white light. So, while we all, in a 
way, believe in Christ, we each believe in our own 
way ; and he is not the same to any two of us. If 
the question were to be passed around, " What think 
ye of Christ ?" no two, except as they answered in 
some one's else words, would return the same answer. 
No one statement is quite valid for two people ; just 
as you know that no one rainbow is quite good for 
two eyes; each eye has its own rainbow. Each 
man's own study of the Gospel, each man's own 
personal experience, extracts from the white light of 
revelation his own tint. So far as there is sincerity 
in the matter, there will be a great deal of individ- 
uality in the matter. 

This leads on to say that Christ, as you apprehend 
him, not as I apprehend him, not as your neighbor 
apprehends him, but Christ as you apprehend him, 
is your Christ — is your open door. You, probably, 
have some ideas about him that are quite definite. 
Then behind those ideas are others that stretch back 
into the dim distance along a long line of perspective. 
But there is some one conception of him (perhaps 
more than one) which you have, that is defined 
enough so that you could think it out to yourself. 



THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 



You might even be able to tell it aloud. Possibly 
you could make a written statement of it that would 
look clear and read intelligibly. The particular 
thought you may have of him may be that he is the 
Son of God ; or that he is the Son of man ; or that 
he is the teacher of a new system of morality ; or 
that he is the personification of the spirit of self-sacri- 
fice ; or that he is a fountain of comfort or a well- 
spring of strength. Some one thing or other, prob- 
ably, he means to you in a peculiar way. There is 
some one point at which he touches you ; some one 
point where his meaning as a person is specially 
gathered. What this point will be will depend a 
good deal upon the way in which you have been 
educated — considerably upon your own tempera- 
ment and condition. If we are in any particular 
distress, Christ will be likely, first of all, to mean to 
us the Being who can relieve that distress ; just as 
to the blind people in Galilee he meant, first of all, 
the restorer of sight ; just as he means to the poor 
inebriates down in our Mission, the Power who saves 
a man from his appetites. We dress him in a garb 
woven out of our necessities. Human necessities 
are the cleft into which the wedge of the Gospel 
strikes. 

But whether due to difference in the way in which 
we have been taught, or to difference in the way we 
are conditioned, there is this difference in the aspect 
which Christ wears to us ; and that is the main point 



THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 



we have to do with here. My Christ is not exactly 
your Christ ; and I have got to be saved by my Christ, 
and you have got to be saved by yours. Doubtless 
as we come to know him better, and to enter more 
deeply into the intimacies of his character and spirit, 
our conceptions of him will have more and more in 
common, and we shall draw nearer and nearer to 
each other in our views and experience of him. It 
would be like vessels running from different ports on 
this side of the Atlantic to a common port — say Liv- 
erpool — on the other side of the Atlantic. One ves- 
sel sails out from Boston, another from New York, 
and so from different points along down the coast to 
Savannah. Their routes may lie a good ways apart 
to begin with, and so, for 1500 or 2000 knots after 
they get out to sea ; but as they approach Liverpool 
their lines of travel more and more thicken up, till 
by the time they pass Holyhead, they are all run- 
ning substantially the same course, and you could 
not judge from their bearings but what they all 
hailed from Boston, or all hailed from Savannah, or 
even from Maracaibo or Rio. There is no point on 
the coast from which a vessel cannot easily reach 
the highway of transatlantic travel, provided only it 
heaves anchor and keeps its nose oceanwards. So, 
when we get into the heart of the heavenly city we 
may be very closely neighbored in our views and ex- 
periences, and none the less so from having first 
entered the city through gates that lie toward dif- 



10 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

ferent points of the compass or at opposite angles of 
the celestial metropolis. 

But Christ is gateway ; and your Christ (I speak 
now particularly to any one of you that has never 
entered into the kingdom) your Christ — that is to 
say, the particular view you have of Christ — is your 
gate. Your gate may be on the opposite side of the 
city from what mine is — clear off at the northeast 
corner, perhaps. If you were to state your idea of 
Christ, you might not find one officer of this church 
or one member of this church that would agree with 
you. That need not make any difference. It is a part 
of the goodness and wisdom of the Lord that gates 
have been widely and generously distributed for the 
convenience of travelers and strangers. It is not nec- 
essary for you to spend the better part of your life per- 
ambulating town bounds to find the door that some 
eminent saint or other of the old or new church went 
in at. Three gates on a side. The Lord is nigh unto 
them that call upon him. Christ, in the conception 
you already have of him, is your gate. There is no 
traveling for you to do in order to reach the gate ; 
no hunting necessary in order to find it. No wait- 
ing requisite. The Bible would not say, " Choose ye 
this day," if there were anything to wait for. Such 
words as " now" and " to-day" would have to be 
left out if the gate were anywhere but directly in 
front of you. If you needed to know more about 
the matter than you do now, or to have a more cor- 



THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 11 

rect or thorough idea of Christ and the doctrines of 
redemption than you possess already, then we should 
have to bid men take Christ as soon as they could 
get some of their difficulties cleared up, or as soon 
as they had made themselves better acquainted with 
the New Testament. We could not say, " Come 
to-day/* but try and be ready to come next Sabbath 
or next week, or week after next. The biblical 
idea of " to-day " just matches this apocalyptic idea 
of three gates on a side — every man's gate close to 
him. 

The object of this is not to encourage the notion 
that it makes no difference how little idea a man has 
of Christ. Our only point is that the veriest scin- 
tilla of an idea, if made available, is enough to begin 
with. Supposing in a dark, starless night you be- 
come lost in the woods. The glimmer of a distant 
candle reaches your eye and you are not lost any 
longer. There may not be light enough about it to 
show you where you are, but you are not lost any 
longer, because there is light enough about it to give 
you a direction. You do not sit down on an old log 
and say, If it were an electric light or a bonfire I 
would avail myself of it. Perhaps it is a bonfire 
made obscure by foliage or by distance. But the size 
of the light will make no difference with your feeling 
that you are not lost any more, because that light 
shows you that your foot is on the threshold of re- 
covery. That light is doorway to recovery, and 



12 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

whether it is a big door or a little door makes no 
difference, provided only you go through the doof 
and quit calculating the arithmetic proportions of 
the casing. 

Any smallest, feeblest conception you may have 
of Christ, will answer every purpose, if only you will 
treat it in the same way that you would treat what 
appeared to be the glimmer of a distant candle, fall- 
ing upon your eye by night, in the midst of a black 
forest. Light is a sure guide, because, unlike sound, it 
goes in straight lines. If you were to strike the tired, 
diminished end of a sunbeam a million million miles 
from the sun, you are on the certain track of the sun 
the instant you begin treading upwards the glimmer- 
ing highway that that sunbeam spreads out for you. 
And wherever, and howsoever far out, upon the cir- 
cumference of Christ's character you take your 
position and begin threading inward any one of its 
radiating lines, you are moving by a line as straight 
as a sunbeam toward the heart and center of the en- 
tire matter. One radius is about as good as another 
for finding the center. Each of the twelve gates 
thresholded a main avenue of the heavenly Jerusa- 
lem. 

In conference with such as come to see me with 
reference to the matter of uniting with the Church, 
it is my habit to ask them what, in their judgment, 
it is to be a Christian. Of course the question re- 
ceives a wide variety of answers, but those answers 



THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 13 

usually have wrapped up in them (for this is the 
gate that men more commonly enter by), as a kernel, 
this idea, that to be a Christian is to be as nearly as 
we can in our daily life what Christ would have us 
be. That is probably with most of us our initial 
conception ; and what the majority of people think, 
is apt to have in it a good deal of truth. When the 
Disciples were bidden by Christ to follow him, 
clearly that meant to them at the outset little more 
than patterning their lives after his, going where he 
went and doing as he did. There was where they 
first took hold of the matter. Anything like mere 
imitation seems mostly to disappear from their life 
in its later manifestations and further developments, 
but it was not much but imitation to begin with. 
They commenced by obeying him and trying to be 
like him. Christ's early instruction to them was in 
this line. Now it must needs be said that this 
obediently doing what God in Christ enjoins upon 
us, important and indispensable as it, of course, is, 
is by no manner of means the best and most distinct- 
ive part of the Christian matter. At the same 
time, there are two things to be said about it that 
are practical and that are in line with our morning's 
thought. 

The first is, that while studiously doing as Christ 
bids us is not the best part of the Lord's matter, it 
is singulary educating, and contributes with wonder- 
ful facility to initiate us into the best part of the 



14 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

Lord's matter. Studious obedience, scrupulous pat- 
terning after a model, is the outer court of almost 
every temple of acquisition that a man can enter. 
It is a very small part of the matter of skilled and 
graceful chirography to sit down before a copy-book 
and painstakingly imitate the strokes there drawn 
for us to pattern after ; but there is no way of 
learning to write with easy grace but by the tuition 
of painstaking imitation. There is no liberty that 
has not to be acquired by obeying. There is a 
good deal of servility in studying to be able to state 
in exact phraseology the thoughts of the master 
minds that have lived and worked before us ; but 
till we have learned with precision to think the 
thoughts of other men after them, we do not know 
how to think our own thoughts for ourselves. And 
it is still more true when you pass from the area of 
mechanics and art into that of ethics, and free 
spirit. There is no way by which a child can so 
learn to know the best and deepest that is in his 
own father as by obeying him. If the wills are 
coincident everything else becomes a kind of com- 
mon property. If two strings vibrate at the same 
rate, one may be a good deal longer than the other, 
but they will sound the same tone. Which is what 
Christ in one instance says of himself — " My judg- 
ment is just because I seek not mine own will but 
the will of him that sent me :" certain that he told 
God's truth because he had no will separate from 



THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 15 

God's will. The short string told the same story as 
the long string because the two vibrated with one 
beat. Obedience, the secret of spiritual vision ; 
loyalty to the word of Christ, the quickest avenue 
into the mystery of Christ. The common habit is 
to put divine mysteries too early in the curriculum. 
A good many people stand aloof from Christ because 
they are not clear on the matter of his divinity. 
There is not much use in trying to believe in the 
divinity of Christ except as that belief comes as the 
fruitage of loyalty to Christ. You will know him as 
fast as you obey him. Ordering our lives after his 
will afford us the best evidences of Christianity. 
" If any man will do his will he shall know the doc- 
trine whether it be of God or whether I speak of 
myself." 

That is one point ; obedience to Christ is only 
gateway so far as relates to the full meaning of 
Christ and of Christian life, but it is gateway that 
portals one of the central avenues conducting di- 
rectly to meanings that are more essential and com- 
plete. The other point is that this matter of taking 
Christ's commands and doing them is not only gate- 
way, but gateway that opens itself immediately in our 
face. We have not to search around in order to find 
it. The door is directly in front of us. Christ's ad- 
monitions as to the way we are to deal with ourselves 
and with each other and with God, address them- 



16 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

selves to us authoritatively. Argument has no par- 
ticular relevancy to them. Proof neither helps nor 
hinders them. They carry their own conviction. 
The lessons he gives us as to the kind of thoughts 
we should think, the sort of words we should speak, 
the ways of forbearance and loving kindness in 
which we should carry ourselves toward our neigh- 
bors — all these things men listen to respectfully 
and approvingly when read. There is no disposition 
to quarrel about them. We think so perfectly alike 
about them that there is no point upon which a 
quarrel could pin itself. And not only is that true 
of people that are grown, but it is as true of the 
children. A child can begin to be a Christian when 
he is ten as well as when he is fifteen or twenty. To 
such a child that asked me how he or she could 
begin to be a Christian, I would say — read every 
day out of the Gospel two or three verses of what 
Christ said and did ; then kneel down and ask God 
to help you to be like Christ in your words and 
deeds ; then go out into the midst of your play or 
your study or your work, and do as nearly as you 
can what you asked God to help you to do. 

And what is good for a child in this matter is good 
for an adult, for we are all of us children with some 
little difference in our years. Is there probably any 
one here, even of those who do not quite consider 
themselves Christians, who would not think it wise to 



THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 17 

preface each day by reminding himself of some les- 
son conveyed by the word or example of Christ, and 
then asking from God the strength needed in order 
to make that lesson efficient in his own daily walk ? 
I am not saying that that is the only way to become 
a Christian, but only that it is one w 7 ay ; and that it 
is a way that some of you would feel to be so free 
from objections that, if you chose, you could adopt 
it without any more waiting, finding nothing in it 
which your conscience would disapprove, or to 
which your judgment would take exception : which 
is only another way of saying that that is a thresh- 
old of entrance into the heavenly kingdom — a 
threshold that lies immediately at your feet ; no 
seeking necessary ; no hunting required ; no philo- 
sophic doubts so far forth, needing to be resolved. 
Up to this point it is a matter involving no theologi- 
cal embarrassment, no intellectual complication. 
We have reduced it to the same simple terms with 
which it addressed itself to the Lord's first followers: 
by the help of God reduplicating in our own sphere 
the life of Christ. To every one here who believes 
in that, but who may be out of the kingdom, that, 
dear friend, is your open door into the kingdom. 
Your foot is just now on the threshold. Your eye 
is in line with the central light of the celestial city. 
Will you by the help of God make Christ, as he is 
revealed in the Gospel, the pattern of your life? 



18 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

There is no place left for argument. There are in 
that no mental difficulties to clear up, no doctrinal 
haze to brush away. Will you by the help of God 
make Christ, as he is revealed in the Gospel, the 
pattern of your life ? You stand at the open gate. 
In front of you is the celestial city. 



II 

^ F* ** r* 

God Is Spirit.— John iv ; &£. 

OD is spirit — which is the reading of the new 
revision, as given in the margin. Not a spirit; 
not one out of many spririts ; not one of a class. 
"A" is indefinite, but not nearly so indefinite as when 
there is no "A." That little word, small as it is, 
gives tired mind something against which it likes to 
lean a little of its weight ; but if erased, thought is 
left to its own helplessness and bewilderment ; 
which is healthy — sometimes. There are certain 
results which can never be attained, either in our 
mental or religious discipline, except as we once in a 
while bravely stand up in front of a truth that shows 
to us no edge and no center. 

God is spirit. So worded, the text yields an idea 
that is without nucleus and without selvedge. No 
shining little peg which we can confidently wind our 
small thoughts around ; no sloping beach upon 
which we can shove our small ideas out of reach of 
the tide and the surf. It is far more a forest to lose 
ourselves in than one in which to fell timber and 

(19) 



20 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

build us a little hut of opinion, or gather chips to 
kindle us a fire and cook us a little mess of particu- 
lar doctrine. 

God is spirit.* With this word of the Lord we 
commence another season's study of truth and pur- 
suit after holiness. It is with intention we have 
prefaced our year's work with a truth comprehensive 
enough to include everything that can justly be said 
here between now and next summer. This is the 
widest, roomiest thing anywhere told us of God. 
Our text gives us, then, space to float about in with- 
out fear of jostling or fouling one another. There 
is comfort and security always in thinking and feel- 
ing along the arc of great circles. The heavens 
are administered upon broad orbits, hence their 
exemption from disaster and collision. And, per- 
haps, also in thinking as in ocean sailing, it is 
following great circles that brings us most quickly 
to our destination. 

No doubt we have to have our little particular 
thoughts about matters of religion and morals, 
exactly as about business and affairs. So we have 
to have our little houses, but we take pains so to 
build them up and out from the firmament beneath 
as to have them participate in the solidity of that 
firmament ; and so we have to have our little halls 
and chambers, but we take care so to window them 
up into the firmament overhead as that they shall 

^Delivered the first Sabbath after the summer vacation of 1887. 



GOD IS SPIRIT. 21 

share in the brightness and freshness of that firma- 
ment and become part of the vastness that is 
frontiered by nothing nearer than the stars. The 
smallest blossom shows a world-beauty, but that is 
because it is first of all an outcome from the world, 
and has sucked up world-wideness and meaning 
through its intertwined roots. 

Everything is a failure that does not begin large. 
That holds everywhere. Small matters do not 
become great by prolonged processes of addition. 
A heap of small notions cannot be so fused together 
as to become one great notion. Greatness at best 
is not so much a matter of quantity as of quality ; 
as the sparkle of the smallest diamond is congener 
with that of the Orloff, Regent or Koh-i-noor. 
Knowing many matters is not wisdom, and piling up 
a lot of little ideas, cob-house fashion, will not give 
us a great, wealthy theology, any more than the 
Postdiluvians could lift themselves into heaven by 
piling up bricks in the plain of Shinar. 

How high you can carry the apex of your pyra- 
mid will depend upon how much base you give to it. 
And in these days, when there is so loud and inces- 
sant a demand for generous ethics and broad theol- 
ogy, let it be frankly said that no particular ideas 
that we may have of God or men or morals can 
possess abiding worth that do not in the last analysis 
connect back in a living way with the massive 
breadth of underlying truth that is eternal. We 



22 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

believe with all our might in a liberal theology, but 
not in any such liberal theology as a small man 
unconscious of or indifferent to the eternal verities 
can sit down in his study or his office or his parlor 
and extemporize. Liberal theology, deserving the 
name, is not obtainable by soaking crusts of Calvin- 
ism till they are softened to a mush of concession or 
drawn out into a watery gruel of latitudinarianism ; 
nor by whittling down an old dogma of the West- 
minster Assembly till it is a peg attenuated enough 
to fit into the small hole of personal preference and 
convenience. Liberal theology, no less than any 
other theology, can derive its worth and dignity 
only from the immensity and living energy of the 
basal truths of God with which it is vitalized and 
irradiated, the same as the smallest rose-petal glows 
only with the luster that is a quotation from the 
sun, and the most delicate rose-pistil is held erect 
by the cosmic energy of all the stars. 

Hence, notwithstanding — and not only that, but 
just because #/— the popular insistence upon what is 
practical and easy and congenial in theology and 
pulpit deliverances, arises the necessity of con- 
ferring often with the massive fundamentals of our 
religion and invigorating our hearts and saturating 
our thoughts with the life-energy of divine truth 
forever inherent in them, that so our powers of feel- 
ing and of reason may have a safe and sure trend given 
them, and we be secured against the danger of deck- 



GOD IS SPIRIT. 23 

ing out our theology with leaves and flowers that 
stand in no natural relation with the soil of the 
heavenly Word, and take hue and shape at no im- 
pulse that comes down to us from what is divine 
overhead or that rises up to us from what is eter- 
nal beneath. 

And, in passing, it lies near by to remark the 
inspiration that a young or otherwise undisciplined 
mind can draw from conference with these great 
unfathomed and unmargined truths of God. No 
material is offered which more swiftly goes to com- 
pose the structure of personal breadth and stamina. 
The entrance of such thoughts into the mind stimu- 
lates its energies and enhances its resources, some- 
thing as the entering of a great master-mind into a 
community works magically and baptismally upon 
all the members of that community. Viewed simply 
as a matter of mental discipline there is nothing 
which has so ministered to the possibilities of the 
intellect as the science of the great things of God. 
No other theme wakens so deep echoes or arouses 
to such gropings, searchings and findings. And, as 
I say, I never cease marveling how accessible such 
truths as that of our text are to young or otherwise 
undisciplined minds. We never need be afraid of 
saying to a child or a barbarian a great thing about 
God. Mind comes into being religiously endowed. 
As soon as a plant gets through the crust of the 
ground it begins to grow up. Every man has a 



24 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

genius for the apprehension of divine things. The 
cords are all drawn and tuned upon which the mar- 
velous song is to be played. We found it in the 
chapter read this morning in Romans, where we are 
told that mind is divinely constructed with a capac- 
ity for recognizing divine things, appreciating them 
as such. You adjust your clock to keep time with 
the sun. We are adjusted to keep time with the 
sun. It was just to a poor, unschooled water-bearer 
that this truth of our text was spoken. We need to 
remember that. The most difficult thing that could 
be told her, and yet Christ judged her equal to the 
lesson. It is curious to notice how soon she showed 
signs of believing in him ; and we may be sure that 
her whole life was changed, not because he lectured 
her on the mischiefs and the grossness of her life 
(and how gross it was is evident enough) but be- 
cause he let into her seeing eye a vision of the 
majesty and glory of God. The mind is made for 
just this. There is a spirit in man and the inspira- 
tion of the Almighty giveth them understanding. 
It is well enough to prick men's consciences, but a 
wounded conscience shows marvelous recuperative 
powers. 

The pulpit needs to preach against particular sin, 
but needs also to remember that Christ's hint at the 
adulterous relations in which the Samaritan woman 
was living was followed up by a discourse that left 
her thoughts centered not upon herself, nor her 



GOD IS SPIRIT. 25 

paramour, nor her sin, but upon her unspeakable 
God. Childhood, ignorance, is no bar to religious 
perceptions or intuitions. Theology is easier than 
astronomy or geology ; for we are more nearly akin 
to the Almighty than we are to the stars or the 
rocks. The Bible is God's breath whispering to the 
soul of man his own unconscious secrets. Even 
without the intervention of reasoning or of logic — 
and sometimes better without it than with it — the 
things of God are to the mind a presence and a 
power ; something as we can draw down a great 
inspiration from the mountains and the constella- 
tions, even though we may never have learned the 
series of geological strata or been taught the laws of 
Kepler. Only a nice analysis will yield up the 
chemical elements of the air, but even a coarse 
string hung in the casement will tremble before the 
wind and in aeolian music utter the wind's deepest 
meaning and longing, and even a savage will bend 
to the singing string a listening ear, and the child 
find the music in the air becoming in his own heart a 
gladness, and upon his own lips a song. 

This unmargined and unfathomed exhibit of God 
as we have it in our text, is furthermore important 
and to our instant and constant advantage because 
a great, wide, profound sense of God in his un- 
discriminated unity is a necessary preliminary to 
any safe and helpful estimate of him in the more di- 
versified character under which he has evinced him- 



26 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

self in later revelation. We believe in Christ, cer- 
tainly, but we must be thorough and say that faith 
in Christ is not the beginning of the matter. Faith 
in the //^-incarnated God logically antedates and is 
fundamental to faith in God incarnate. God is the 
temple ; Christ is the vestibule through which we have 
access to the interior of the temple. We cannot fully 
enter into the temple's glorious interior except by 
availing ourselves of the vestibule, but. we shall 
never put foot inside of the vestibule for the pur- 
pose of entrance till we have first the profound as- 
surance of a temple into which the vestibule con- 
ducts. We may contemplate that temple only in 
the massive proportions which it exhibits outwardly, 
its solemn vastness, its cold and distant spires, the 
shaded, meaningless shapes, painted from within in 
bright, glowing colors upon the window-lights ; but 
if it is the vestibule that draws us near to the temple 
in the second instance, it is not till the temple has 
first drawn us near to the vestibule in the first in- 
stance. It is as John records Christ as saying : " No 
man can come to me except the Father draw him." 
Man believes first of all in God. Philip spake the 
heart of man universal when he said: "Shew us the 
Father and it sufficeth us." While it is true that 
Christ reveals God, it is antecedently true that only 
God reveals Christ. Only the sun makes visible the 
window through which we look sunwards. Only the 
sun makes available the telescope by which we study 



GOD IS SPIRIT. 27 

the sun. God is more fundamental than Christ. 
That is a doctrine taught at Princeton. We are 
hearing in certain quarters a good deal about a 
Christo-centric theology, a theology that affects to 
group itself exclusively around Christ. Such phras- 
ing is plausible and is calculated to tickle an ortho- 
dox ear ; but the phrase is a good deal of it sophis- 
try, and what of it is not sophistry is cant. It was 
along this line precisely that the lamented Hodge of 
Princeton was speaking shortly before his death, 
when he said : "All theology must be Theocentric, 
and a great deal of confusion of thought arises from 
substituting words for thoughts in the pious claim 
in vogue now-a-days that all theology must be 
grouped Christo-centrically. ,, Says St. Paul: "The 
head of every man is Christ, and the head of Christ 
is God." And he says also in Corinthians: "When 
all things shall be subdued unto the Son, then shall 
the Son also himself be subject unto him that put 
all things under him, that God may be all in all." 

We can certainly have no narrow, selfish object in 
representing God as more fundamental than Christ, 
any more than could Archibald Hodge in the passage 
just quoted, unless a supreme ambition to know and 
state things as they are be deemed narrow and sel- 
fish. But Theology is one thing, and Christology is 
another. And it is not because Christ signifies so lit- 
tle to me, but because he signifies so much, that I 
have the impulse and the courage to push this. But 



28 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

a correct knowledge of relations, divine as well as 
human, hinges upon standpoint. A thing is not 
known until it is known right. Relations cannot be 
appreciated till you stand where relations can be 
squarely and distinctly beheld. There is only one 
outlook which a man can occupy in order to grasp 
the truth of the solar system ; and therefore there 
was no just science of the solar system till Coper- 
nicus. You cannot grasp the topography of a re- 
gion of country till you reach a standpoint which 
uncovers to you the physical axis around which its 
hills, valleys and rivers are organized and its moun- 
tains co-ordinated. This illustrates the matter in hand. 
Theology is greater than Christology and contains 
it. There is a great deal in religion besides the 
Son of God, and a great deal that is logically funda- 
mental to him. The one living, unfleshed, undivided 
and undistinguished God-spirit is the basis of the 
whole theological pyramid, the root of the entire 
theological tree ; and your Christian superstructure 
can rise no higher than your theistic base runs 
deep. 

You can be only as sound a trinitarian as you are 
first profound a monotheist. A keen sense of God in 
his oneness is the only condition upon which a man 
ought ever to venture to be a trinitarian, even as it 
is the only bond strong enough to keep the mani- 
foldness that is in God from splitting apart into 
competitive sections, and restrain trinitarianism from 



GOD IS SPIRIT. 29 

becoming only a churchy name for baptized polythe- 
ism. I wish that we were all Christians, and felt 
through and through the divineness that comes near 
to us in the person and life of God's Son, Jesus 
Christ. But even in the same instant, I deprecate 
the language we are so likely, some of us, to use of 
those who believe in God and try to serve him, but 
have no distinct conviction as to the nature of Jesus 
Christ. What I mean is, that we cannot afford to 
say of a man that he is nothing but a theist. It is a 
great thing to be able to speak from the heart just 
the first four words of the Apostles' Creed, even if 
we have to stop there. The Jews were nothing but 
theists. Great Abraham — the friend of God — was 
nothing but a theist ; Moses, Samuel, Elijah, David 
— nothing but theists. They were not unitarians 
because they did not deny the threefoldness of God, 
and unitarians do. But not any more were they 
trinitarians, because they knew nothing about the 
threefoldness of God, and trinitarians do. But 
although nothing but theists, their faith in the great 
God-spirit was a joy to the Almighty and salvation to 
their own souls ; they laid wide the foundations of the 
future, unconsciously prepared the highway for the 
coming of the Redeemer, and are to-day, in part, the 
strong shoulders upon which is upborne our own 
blessed era of a Father reconciled, a Son become 
flesh and dwelling among us and a Holy Spirit de- 
scending in Pentecostal baptism. 



30 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

Let me go on still a little farther and say, that 
however jealous we maybe of evangelical truth, and 
however profoundly we may believe in the divinity 
of Christ, God manifest in the flesh is deity shorn of 
a portion of its divine attributes, so far at least as 
the actual exercise of those attributes is concerned, 
and no man can limit his gaze to the scope of the 
divine man of Galilee with any just expectation of 
fostering in his own mind and life a conception and 
experience of God in the fullness and completeness 
of his divine character. In the historic Christ we 
see God under self-imposed limitations. It is some- 
thing as in the case of a father taking short steps to 
keep pace with his little child. He is an adult all 
the same, but for the instant makes a child revela- 
tion of himself for the sake of his child. St. Paul 
expresses this truth when, in speaking of the incar- 
nation, he says in the Second of Philippians (using 
now the phrasing of the new revision, which is both 
more accurate and more graphic) : " Have this mind 
in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who existing 
in the form of God, counted not the being on an 
equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied 
himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in 
the likeness of man." 

" He emptied himself ! " — that is the expression I 
want you should let stick in your memories. You 
cannot see the sun except through smoked glass, 
Jt is quite like what every man has to do in all hia 



GOD IS SPIRIT. 31 



efforts to bless those that are farther down than he. 
Self-repression is a part of the key to all successful 
ministration. In teaching an ignorant child, you 
take care not to let him see all your wisdom ; in aid- 
ing a poor man you take care not to let him feel all 
your wealth ; in becoming limbs to a paralytic you 
sere careful not to betray all the fullness and exuber- 
ance of your own physical vigor. Christ is God 
manifest in the flesh, but he is at the same time God 
concealed in the flesh, God " emptied." And espe- 
cially is there in him the repression of those features 
of deity that challenge the awe of the worshipper, 
and stir in him emotions of God's supernal majesty, 
ineffable glory and power. A smoked glass held 
before the sun lets through only a part of the sun's 
rays, and those only of a particular hue. So incar- 
nation is the smoked glass through which we behold 
the veritable God to be sure, but with most of the 
divine rays intercepted except those of Godly tend- 
erness and love. Other attributes can be shown in 
other ways : " The heavens declare the glory of God 
and the firmament showeth his handiwork." 

These illustrations have not been used for the pur- 
pose of simplifying the doctrine of incarnation — 
although they may be of some service in that way — 
but for the purpose of illustrating the truth, that 
while in the historic Christ there dwelt all the full- 
ness of the Godhead bodily, it was no purpose of his 
to let us find and feel in him all the fullness of the 



32 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

Godhead bodily. Godhead that has emptied itself, 
suppressed itself, is not Godhead that shows God to 
us in all the round completeness of his supernal per- 
fection. And here suggests itself one of the ele- 
ments of weakness in current religious knowledge 
and experience ; not that we walk too closely with 
Christ, or that Christ means too much to us, but 
that we are not diligently supplementing the knowl- 
edge of God's love to us as Christ reveals it, with 
the knowledge of God's crushing attributes of all- 
power and everlastingness, filling all space and time, 
from everlasting to everlasting, before the morning 
stars, mightier than the noise of many waters, sitting 
upon the circle of the earth, holding the stars in his 
hand. These things we do not find and cannot feel 
in converse or communion with the tired Nazarene 
sitting on Jacob's well, the tearful Nazarene weeping 
over Jerusalem, or the dying Nazarene bleeding upon 
the cross. All the way through from Bethlehem to 
Olivet you see the pressure of the bonds of voluntary 
self-limitation. There are a hundred notes in the 
gamut of God's perfection that are dumb if you let all 
your religious thought terminate in the " man of sor- 
rows " and deity " emptied." God is spirit. We come 
back to the words of the now sainted Princetonian : 
" The z/7z-incarnate God must be more fundamental 
than the incarnate God." 

The supreme necessity of the human soul, intel- 
lectually, morally and spiritually, is to know God. 



GOD IS SPIRIT. 33 

To this end we will use incarnation with the pur- 
pose for which it was divinely intended, and gather 
the blessed lesson of God's infinite tenderness ; 
but we will remember that there is infinitely much 
in God which it was no part of God-incarnate's 
purpose to embody; infinitely much without which 
even infinite tenderness would be of little account. 
God is more and greater than even his love. We 
will walk with Christ, but we will walk with our 
own consciences too. We will stand at the foot 
of the Cross on Calvary, but we will walk also amid 
the cold, grey shadows thrown down from the old Ara- 
bian mountain of the law. We will search after God 
in the New Testament scriptures, but we will find 
him also in the perhaps harder passages, and cer- 
tainly colder and more towering imagery of the old 
Bible of the Hebrews ; we will come close to him in 
the volume of his grace, but we w T ill bow ourselves 
before him in chastened reverence as he speaks 
down to us from out the oldest of all inspired scrip- 
tures, the hills, the forests and the solemn stars. 
We have gained vastly over the Jews in our appre- 
hension of the love of God, but we have fallen far 
behind the Jews in our appreciation of God's glory 
and unspeakable majesty. We have found the 
Father but we have lost much of the King. Be- 
cause we have learned that God can become man, 
we have almost ventured to think that God is man, 
and are permitting ourselves to approach him with 



34 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

almost that easy, flippant familiarity with wh.ich 
friend confers with equal friend ; to carry ourselves 
toward his holy and distinct commands with some- 
thing of that careless indifference with which a 
spoiled child treats the wishes of a foolish and dot- 
ing grandfather, and even to enter his hallowed 
courts or bow in secret worship with less of humil- 
ity, reverence and true piety than that with which 
the Catholic bends before the virgin mother, or the 
pagan sacrifices to his gods of wood and stone. 

God is spirit. May it be one of the results of our 
work and association together this year that the 
great God-spirit shall mean more to us in our daily 
thought and act ; that he shall become a larger ele- 
ment in our theology, make out a more conspicuous 
factor in our plans and hopes for the life now and 
the life to come, be the deep basal note undergo- 
ing all the diversified harmony of our lives, the great 
holy gracious Presence pervading all our experience, 
urging us to duty, sweetening our lives, hallowing 
our worship. 



Ill 

©ft* ^Levne of gUIigtatt* *£jm#ati<m. 

The Spirit ef Man is the Candle of the Lord. 
— Prov. xx:27. 

TO URNING it may be, or may not be; but it is 
J^ candle. Able to shine ; constructed to shine; 
but not a light until it has been lighted — the candle 
of the Lord. All that Solomon, therefore, says here 
of man's spirit is that it is part of us, and able to 
produce flame when it has been touched with 
flame: simply a candle. It is a special capacity we 
have for feeling, appreciating, and responding to 
divine things — the candle of the Lord. It is the 
point in us where the divine reaches and touches us, 
and affects us ; the window in us that looks toward 
the quarter whence heavenly suggestions and com- 
munications flow down to us. Sound affects the 
ear; light, the eye; the spirit is the nerve of relig- 
ious sensation. It is constitutional, therefore, not 
an affix; not wrought by sanctification, nor by con- 
version, nor even by education. It is in man, and 
of him. It is there as soon as the man is there. It 
is as much constituent of him as his hand, tibia, or 
knee-joint. 

(35) 



36 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

Man is a bundle of adaptations. We stand, by 
birth, in relationship with all kinds of things. 
Everything outside has a little office in us where it 
transacts its own special line of business ; a visual 
lobby, where light makes up its accounts ; an aural, 
where sound conducts its negotiations ; a logical, 
where reasons, arguments, etc., get accommodated; a 
moral, where motives and behaviors are received 
and sorted ; and close by the side of that, an inner 
cabinet where more distant communications and 
dispatches can be taken in, noted, and filed, called 
by us generally the religious sense, by Solomon the 
spirit of man which is the candle of the Lord. 

There are some advantages in conceiving of these 
several lobbies and offices as being all of them 
ranged on the same floor, and in thinking of the 
religious sense as being, equally with the intellectual, 
aesthetic, or physical, purely a constitutional matter. 
The religious sense is only the faculty which all men 
have, in varying degree, of appreciating religious 
and divine things, and does not determine with cer- 
tainty, in any instance, whether we are ourselves 
religious, or have made any considerable attainments 
personally in holiness and the knowledge of God. 
We could not be holy without the instinct, but the 
instinct does not insure our being holy ; and a can- 
dle may stand all day long and all night long with- 
out emitting one flash of that light which it is in 
constitutional preparation to emit. 



THE NER VE OF RELIGIO US SENS A TION. 37 

There is in this respect no difference between the 
religious instinct and other of our instincts. For 
example : Mathematics is the science of quantity. 
Now, a man may have naturally a keen appreciation 
of quantity, without that appreciation having been 
so taught and trained as to make him practically 
capable of mathematical results. A person may be 
endowed with the power of thinking closely and 
rapidly, and yet the circumstances of his case may 
be such as to prevent his ever becoming a scholar. 
Scholarship is impossible without the intellectual 
appreciation, and yet the intellectual appreciation 
will not guarantee the scholarship. It is quite like 
this to say that a man may have a sense of beauty 
and a taste for painting, without his ever becoming 
a painter. You may be musical without being a 
musician. So all men have a conscience ; but con- 
science does not insure conscientiousness. Seneca 
was a moralist without being moral ; and there are 
a great many more acorns than there are oaks. 

This, then, familiarizes us with the practical 
thought that the religious sense forms part of each 
man's original outfit. And it is this religious sense 
that affords to the religious teacher something to 
which he can address his appeal. It gives the 
teacher and the preacher something with which to 
start. It obviates all necessity for apologizing, 
when we confront a congregation and discuss before 
it religious themes, and make allusion to God, soul, 



38 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

and immortality. Speaker and hearer come into 
quick relation. There is not one of us but has in 
his nature a chord that is set vibrating when such 
matters are touched. We came into life with a little 
apartment all furnished for the transaction of just 
such business. No time needs to be spent in set- 
tling preliminaries. It never occurs to us that there 
is any person in whom such a thing as a religious 
instinct needs to be planted. Instincts are not a 
thing that can be planted. There is no going back 
of a man's dowry and supplementing his original 
make with a wing or an annex. It is out of the 
question to build off of a man's constitutional found- 
ations. You cannot talk with me about a matter 
that my vocabulary has no words for and my mind 
or heart no sense or appreciation of. 
. Even atheists, if there are such things, would have 
no permanent interest in the discussion or denial of 
a God that in nowise answered to some inner sense 
of their own. It never occurs to us to kick con- 
secutively at nothing — that is to say, if we are con- 
vinced that it is nothing. If a man is blind, and 
was born blind, it would be inconceivable that he 
should indulge in protracted argument against his 
neighbor's conviction of light and experience of 
color. All he could say to his neighbor would be, 
" When you discourse upon light and color, I don't 
know anything what you are talking about ; I have 
nothing in me that answers to it ; I have no experi- 



THE NERVE OF RELIGIOUS SENSATION. 39 

ence that reads a meaning into your words." So in 
regard to religious matters, it would be absolutely a 
pyschological impossibility for a man to stand up 
before an intelligent audience and expend brilliant 
rhetoric by the hour in denial of a matter that no 
inner sense of his own in any measure answered to. 
It would be inconceivable that a man destitute of an 
auditory nerve should take a hall here in New York, 
and gather an audience, and perpetrate reiterated 
philippics against the art and science of music, using 
with some accuracy the terms of musical science, 
talking about tone and pitch with some evident 
appreciation of what men with a sense of hearing 
mean by tone and pitch, and then you go away from 
that tirade with anything less than a conviction that 
the man was either playing deaf, or had at some 
time had an auditory nerve that was as good as any- 
body's. It is not possible for any man to talk at 
length or with effect about a matter that is to him 
an absolute nonentity. It would be like trying to 
partition space by lines of elaborate stone masonry, 
or splitting up vacuum into polished cubes. 

This is not proving that religion is a fact ; it is 
only proving that a man would not talk about relig- 
ion at length, either pro or contra, would have no 
disposition to, and, more than that, would have no 
power to, unless he had a religious sense, unless he 
had a sense which religion, if it were a fact, would 
accurately answer to. So long as a man declaims 



40 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 



against light, you know that he is not very blind 
yet ; so long as he takes pains to depreciate music, 
you are confident that he can hear a little at times; 
and so long as in his denial of God he can use with 
anything like accuracy or appreciation the terms and 
phrases in which you acknowledge God, you will be 
similiarly assured that he has at least a religious 
sense that is very much like your own. 

And then the facility with which children can be 
approached in religious matters, even the younger 
ones, shows that religion is a matter of instinct, 
before it is a matter of education. It is possible 
that you have not reflected, all of you, on the incal- 
culable difficulty you would encounter in giving a 
child religious instruction were there not already in 
the child the religious bent before the religious 
instruction began. You never could teach him any- 
thing in that line, or in any other, were there not 
something already in the child ready to your hand 
before ever the disciplinary process commenced. 
How would you set about to produce in your child 
an enjoyment of certain combinations of tones if 
there were not between the child and those tones an 
inborn congeniality that was already at work prior 
to anything like instruction on your part ? The 
first, third and fifth of the musical scale together 
produce a pleasant impression upon the child's ear, 
without instruction. Now, if that chord would not 
produce a pleasant impression upon the child with- 



THE NERVE OF RELIGIOUS SENSATION. 41 

out instruction, how would you go to work to make 
it produce a pleasant impression by means of in- 
struction? Or, to use another illustration a little 
closer to our matter, you can teach a child that to 
do this thing is right ; to do that thing is wrong. 
But what is the first step you would take to start in 
a child that moral sense of right and wrong that 
enables him to understand that certain things are 
proper, and other certain things improper ? In 
other words, if a child did not come into the 
world with the rudiments of a conscience already 
formed, how would you go to work to create 
those rudiments after once he was in ? And so of 
religion, which embraces still another class of facts 
and experiences. How would you proceed to make 
your child religious, prayerful, reverent toward God, 
if you did not find already in the child a chord that 
vibrated at the touch of religious story and appeal ? 
So far from intellectual discipline having been the 
means of creating in the child a religious conscious- 
ness, it has often been the case, and in some of these 
families, I think, that the religious consciousness 
was fully abreast of the intellectual, and that when 
the intellectual discipline came, it found the religious 
experiences already there, and waiting for classifica- 
tion and designation, just as the dawn lies quite a 
little while in the east before ever the sundial has 
a chance to indicate the hour of the day ; and just 
as little Samuel felt the Unseen Presence, and heard 



42 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

his voice, before ever he knew enough to think of it 
as divine, and call it Lord. 

This, too, grounds our faith in missionary work, 
and accounts for the large results which missionary 
devotion and enterprise have achieved in all ages 
and latitudes. The missionary never finds himself 
obliged to lay foundations. Man, as such, Jew or 
Gentile, Greek or barbarian, has religious founda- 
tions already in him. Wherever missionaries have 
gone it is found that an entering wedge in the shape 
of a religious consciousness has already been struck 
by nature into the solid ledge of human depravity. 
So far forth, the best saint and poorest devil stand 
en rapport. Even the foul spirit at Philippi called 
out after Paul, and the devils of Gergesa and Caper- 
naum recognized Christ and confessed him to be the 
Holy One of God. Paul does not find the same 
sort of doctrinal conception in Lyconia as at Tarsus 
and Antioch, nor preach the same kind of sermon to 
the theologians of Judea as to the Stoics and 
Epicureans of Athens ; but he presupposed in all 
men, without distinctions of nationality or civiliza- 
tion, a religious sense, and his appeal was made to 
it, and response came back to him from it. Modern 
missions proceed upon the same basis as apostolic, 
and because all men give tokens of a religious sense 
we are encouraged and constrained to expect that 
all kingdoms and peoples, families and tribes, will 
be ultimately subdued to religious power. 



THE NERVE OE RELIGIOUS SENSATION. 43 

Now, this inborn religious sense is an easy argu- 
ment for the existence of God. We have called this 
sense a window of the soul ; and a window exists for 
the sake of something outside to which it may give 
admission. Things exist in couplets ; one member 
of the couplet implies the other. You see a fence- 
post with a rail-hole in it, and immediately think of 
the rail. Thought flashes across from one to the 
other involuntarily. If you study the eye, with all 
its delicate arrangement of lenses, you are at once 
put upon thinking of the light with which it stands 
m such exquisite relations, and you feel sure there 
would have been no such eye had there been no light 
of which it was to serve as the organ. So the ear is 
more delicate and more multitudinous in its adjust- 
ments than the finest piano ; but even if you knew 
nothing of its relations to sound, you would instantly 
and necessarily infer that there must be something 
outside of the ear to which those minute vibratory 
surfaces in the ear deftly respond. In all our inves- 
tigation of these organs we start out with the pre- 
sumption that no foolishness and no waste and no 
falsehood has been perpetrated in their structure. 
We have confidence in these organs, and in the rela- 
tions to which they bear quiet testimony. 

So of our intellectual faculties ; under certain condi- 
tions they give us conclusions that we call truthful. 
We reason from the faculty upward, and conclude 
that there is such a thing as truth quite independent 



44 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

of the faculty, and to which the faculty stands in con- 
stituted relation. Now, all the ground we have for 
supposing that there is such a thing as truth is what 
we get from that faculty, and the confidence we 
have in it. So of the right ; we each of us believe 
that there is such a thing as the right, separate and 
apart from anything in the way of education or con- 
vention ; but the only grounds of this assurance are 
what is given us in our own conscience. We trust 
the conscience, and so are convinced that there is 
such a thing as the right ; that is all there is to it. 
It is in the same way that we become persuaded of 
beauty, natural beauty, artistic beauty. Our 
aesthetic sense deals with that matter, and tells us 
all we know about it, and we believe that there is 
such a thing as beauty simply because we trust our 
own aesthetic sense that gives to us the information. 
Our assurance, in each of these instances, has been 
the confidence we have in ourselves, the conviction 
that, structurally, human nature is not a lie. Now 
it remains to ask why exception is taken in the case 
of the religious sense ? We trust the aesthetic and 
the moral and the intellectual ; we credit the eye, 
the ear, the nose — everything but just this ; why not 
this? Why not just as confidently argue the 
divine from the religious sense as the beautiful from 
the aesthetic sense? History is quite as full of it, 
profane as well as sacred ; our lives are fully as re- 
plete with it ; it asserts itself in us at quite as early 



THE NERVE OF RELIGIOUS SENSATION. 45 

an age ; is as universal in its prevalence ; and even 
those who are most pronounced, persistent, and 
blatant in their defamation of religion depend for 
their defamatory genius upon the very aid that this 
selfsame sense ministers to them, and so are like 
Rachel, who, the instant she was denying the theft, 
was sitting in her own tent upon the very idols that 
she had filched from out her fathers house. 

But that is not all there is to it. Questioning one 
sense is like stepping on quicksand ; you may be 
willing to sink a little way, but when you commence 
settling, the likelihood is that you will not stop set- 
tling till you reach the bottom. " Falsus in uno, 
falsus in omnibus." Human nature is one. If it is 
faithless at one point, you have no guarantee that it 
is not a liar at every other point. If it is not to be 
relied upon in its testimony as to divine things, the 
ground is all taken away from underneath the confi- 
dence with which you regard its testimony as to 
things moral, aesthetic, and scientific. Your assur- 
ance of beauty, truth, and even of a sun in the sky, 
depends upon precisely that same confidence in the 
structural truthfulness of your own constitution that 
your assurance of a God does. There is the same 
opportunity for agnosticism to slip in between your 
eye and the sun as there is between your spirit and 
the Son of Righteousness. The whole building, and 
everything on the roof fell when Samson had 
broken it in one of its supports. There is a kind of 



46 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

modesty about agnosticism that wins our regard, 
were it not that in the arbitrary way in which it 
selects what we may know and what we may not, 
there is a degree of impudence that challenges our 
contempt. If we cannot trust our religious sense, 
and keep the faith we have in our religion, then, in or- 
der to be consistent, we shall have gradually to with- 
draw our confidence from the other senses, and yield 
up the faith we have in science, ethics, and aesthetics. 

If it should happen that I am addressing any man 
who has drifted into the fogs of agnosticism, let me 
say to you that the fundamental question you have 
to put to yourself is not whether God is knowable, 
but whether our common nature is one that is to be 
trusted. If it is not, then all of its testimonies are 
discredited, and you lose your religion and your 
science at the same time. If it is to be trusted, 
then all its testimonies are accredited, and you save 
your science and go on with your faith, your hope, 
and your worship. 

And now let me say as a concluding thought, that 
the possession of this religious instinct puts us upon 
the track of a very simple and practical duty. It is 
true the possession of that instinct does not make us 
holy, but whether we become holy or not will de 
pend mostly upon how we treat that instinct, and 
upon whether we repress and smother it or give it 
tree chance of unfolding. Probably there is no un- 
believer here but that, if he would give such relig- 



THE NERVE OF RELIGIOUS SENSATION. 47 

ious impulses as are in him opportunity to enlarge 
themselves, and would gather about those impulses 
all such influences as would conduce to promote 
that enlargement, would soon find himself overmas- 
tered by them, and the surrender of himself to his 
Heavenly Father be both easy and necessary. And 
this is one particular object of each recurring Sun- 
day service : it is to feed and nurture and quicken to 
a little stronger life still the tendencies religionward, 
that do make their presence and their unfoldings 
felt even in the hearts of them that are not quite 
ready yet to confess even to themselves that there 
is something lying forward of them that is more 
than anything to which they have yet reached. The 
plant life, you know, goes quietly along with its 
growing, even before it has quite detached itself 
from the seed, and pricked up through the soil into 
the air, and shown a green leaf outside. And it is 
sometimes the case, when a man is steadily yielding 
himself to the gentle pressure of gospel truth 
upon him, and is letting these impulses be warmed 
and moistened by that truth, that he feels his oppo- 
sition relaxing, and himself little by little, succumb- 
ing even before the consummating act, and con- 
sciousness of surrender is completely reached ; for it 
is not in the world at large alone, but in each indi- 
vidual heart, that the truth of God works with the 
quietness and gradualness of leaven. 

Now, there are two things that, under the circum- 



48 THREE GATES ON A SIDE: 

stances are to be demanded ; the first demand is 
upon the preacher, that he keep the religious sense 
of the unconverted ones among his hearers steadily 
in view ; that he have something always that shall 
minister to that sense and promote in the hearer the 
consciousness of being a religious creature, with re- 
lations to things eternal and divine ; that he bring 
suitable truth to him with all possible closeness, 
never forgetting that this religious impulse in his un- 
repentant hearer is not a thing to be dealt with 
harshly, imperatively, and scoldingly, but rather as 
the florist deals with the little germinating seed, who 
is never angry with it for growing so slowly, but 
deems it rather a thing to be gently nurtured than 
upbraided, and patiently fostered than petulantly 
driven and compelled. 

The other demand, and a very proper one, I am 
sure you will allow, is upon the unconverted hearer 
himself : that he hold himself, quietly, steadily, and 
yieldingly, under all those influences that seem 
adapted to expand that germ of religious conscious- 
ness that is in him. You know how, if a man de- 
sires to become a painter, he not simply seizes the 
brush himself and learns to paint by painting, but is 
careful to come into association with the products of 
genius in others, that his own art consciousness may 
be stimulated, the possibilities of his nature be ful- 
filled, and his own appreciations of beauty brought 
to fullest tension. 



THE NER VE OF RELIGIO US SENS A TZOiV. 49 

If a reply to this effect were to come back from 
any hearer, viz : " I would like to become a Christian 
but for some reason these matters do not take a 
strong, deep, hold of me ; I don't believe I have 
any religious sense," two things are to be said in 
answer: In the first place, the mere desire to 
stand in different relations with God, the mere 
suspicion that there are any such relations in 
which you can stand, all of it proceeds from that 
same religious sense in you which you were just now 
denying. 

The second thing to say is that it rests with you 
to take some sturdy measures to bring out this 
religious consciousness into greater force and fuller 
glow. I remember the case of a gentleman with 
some appreciation of natural beauty, who made a 
visit of a couple of weeks in Berkshire County, 
Massachusetts. He had heard much said of the in- 
comparable beauty of the region, but expressed 
himself on his arrival as sadly disappointed. He 
was a man, however, who was always willing to find 
more than met him at the first glance, and so he 
spent the days of his stay out in the open air under- 
neath the unparalleled blue of a Berkshire sky, with 
his eye continually bared and his heart unfolded to 
the last communication that dropped upon him 
from out the air, or that flowed down upon him 
from off the hills ; and there never went out of Berk- 



50 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

shire a truer lover of the charms of that beatific 
region. The things that are best have to be wooed 
before they are won. 

You have attended the rendering of an oratorio 
that you had heard rapturously commended by ap- 
preciative musical critics, and you sat during the 
performance quietly wondering whether the stupid- 
ity was chargeable to the critics, who did enjoy it, 
or to you who did not. And yet here and there a 
strain stayed with you after it was all over ; and, 
partly because it was the thing to do and partly 
because you had suspicions and presentiments that 
ran ahead of actual realization, you went again and 
again, and the thing grew in steady revelation be- 
fore you, and before you were done with it you 
thought you heard the kingdom of God coming, and 
saw the ladder set up, and the angels ascending and 
descending upon it, and the heavens opened, and God 
speaking, and the air swarming with forty thousand 
angels singing, " Glory to God in the highest. " You 
had not found the oratorio ; the oratorio had found 
you, and waked your soul up, and set it singing in lan- 
guage it had never learned. Or, to change the illus- 
tration, you have gone into the cathedral at Ant- 
werp, and seated yourself before Rubens's " Descent 
from the Cross. " Your first impression very likely 
was what a morbid amount of bloody anatomy the 
gross Fleming succeeded in throwing upan a few feet 



THE NERVE OF RELIGIOUS SENSATION. 51 

of canvas. And your first visit was disappointing; 
hut something in the picture, answering to some- 
thing in you, brought you back again, and you re- 
newed your study, and began, little by little, to cease 
looking at it, and commenced looking into it, and 
little patches of disclosure began to come out all 
over it, as in any morning landscape strokes of bright- 
ness show themselves here and there upon the hills 
and in the tops of the trees before ever the shrubs 
and the meadows have been flushed ; and the gold 
began to glitter in the quartz, and the jewel to show in 
the shell, and there was a meaning behind the faces, 
and the nail-holes in the hands and the feet brought 
a mist into your eyes, and the blood-drops became 
each a separate evangel, the pallid face read you the 
story of God's agony, Golgotha was removed to the 
North Sea, and a felt Presence in the old Belgic church 
sent you forth saddened and chastened. You had 
not found the artist ; the artist had found you. 

Dear friend, the application is simple. You have 
not to find God or his truth ; let him and his truth 
find you. Let the Holy Spirit tap at the string in 
your heart that is waiting to vibrate. Quietly and 
patiently hold your spirit beneath the truth, and let 
it be touched and played upon. Never shake off 
the impression that earnest preaching, prayer and 
song form within you, but let it go on and strengthen 
and deepen, and have its entire way with you, and 



52 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

work its whole effect ; and your heart will assuredly 
grow large within you, and you will certainly find 
this holy Word of God breaking up into scenes 
more moving and pathetic than any Flemish canvas 
can yield, and springing forth into song more laden 
with pressure and appeal than any Messianic Ora- 
torio. 



IV 



The Kingdom of God is Not in Word, but in 
Power.— I Col. iv:20. 

n7HE interest just now so deeply felt, not only by 
our own communion, but throughout the 
Church at large, in the matter of a worded statement 
of Christian truth, suggests the general inquiry: 
What part is it that a statement of truth, be it an 
uninspired one, or an inspired one, really plays in 
the great matter of Christian being and Christian 
living? Are words the core of the matter? or 
what are they ? What is the pith of this that we 
call Christianity? 

It seems like threshing over old wheat to go back 
to a question so elementary. It would be thought 
puerile for a mathematician, standing before a body 
of mathematicians, to come back on to primary 
ground and make an argument about the nature of 
mathematics. The cases, however, are hardly paral- 
lel. It is an observed fact with regard to all relig- 
ions that they tend, in course of time, to part with 
much of their originary character, and to make a 

(53) 



54 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

change of base ; and this change we can say, in a 
general way, is not a change for the better. It is 
not the coarsest ingredients that are generally elimi- 
nated from a religion, but the finest. Nothing is 
made more clear by the comparative study of relig- 
ions than that religions deteriorate. If men are not 
brought up to a level with their religion, their relig- 
ion they will bring down to a level with themselves. 
The truest, deepest things in any system impose a 
tax upon us, assert an expensive imperialism over 
us. This makes them irksome, and we go quietly 
about to devise some means by which, without 
throwing our religion overboard bodily, we can 
evade it in those respects wherein it makes inconve- 
nient demands upon us. In that way the original 
material is being steadily replaced by that of an 
inferior grain. The average Mohammedan to-day is 
not nearly so good a man as Mahomet was. Juda- 
ism, in the time of our Lord, bore almost no resem- 
blance to the character of Moses. In every case, 
the further you trace the current back and up toward 
its fountain head the clearer and more sparkling you 
find its waters to be. 

And Christianity is no slightest exception to that 
rule. The tendency has always been steadily to 
slip away from that in the system that is axial ; 
from its deepest realities to those that are shallower, 
and from its shallower realities to its destitute for- 
malities, till one, without any conscious abandon- 



THE SECRET OF POWER 55 

ment of the faith, at last comes to the point where 
really he is no longer held by any vital and essential 
ingredient of the faith. So that, as long as preach- 
ing is necessary, it will always be in point, and 
always requisite, to discuss, even in the presence of 
Christians, the question, what is Christianity ? Not 
for the purpose of arriving at the current consensus 
of opinion about it, but only to the end of getting 
nearer to the fountain head of the stream, and 
striking the stream at a point where its waters have 
not yet become mixed with philosophy or muddied 
by sin. The kingdom of God is not in word, but in 
power. And we, too, shall imitate the example of 
the Apostle in this verse, in trying to show what 
Christianity in its essence is by putting it in as dis- 
tinct contrast as possible with one of the things that 
it is not : not word, but power ; and " word " here 
we shall interpret broadly to cover the whole area of 
stated truth, whether that statement were made by 
Moses or the Lord, by St. Paul or Calvin, early or 
late, inspired or uninspired. 

God has put truth into word, and so given us a 
Bible, for the purpose of making the divine a practi- 
cal working factor inside each man's own individual 
life ; not taking the " divine," though, in the sense 
of a philosophical tenet, a theological credo, or an 
ethical model ; but taking the divine in its very 
presence, power, personality, and pressure so that by 
virtue of it we become organs of God, and young 



56 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

incarnations. A man is not at his best, indeed he 
is not a man fully and fairly, till he is an inspired 
man, and until his own energies gain their final 
touch of effectiveness through the power of God 
working within him to will and to do of the divine 
good pleasure. 

Inspiration, instead of being a lost art, is only 
beginning to be a discovered art. By limiting the 
term to the production of a volume of Scripture, we 
have cramped the true sphere of inspiration, and 
elbowed it into a corner, instead of frankly recogniz- 
ing it as an atmosphere diffused through every cham- 
ber of Christian life and experience. And the result 
of such elbowing is evident. As soon as inspiration 
is once thought of as limited to the divine assistance 
by which, long time ago, a few men wrote the Bible, 
then, when that writing has been finished, and the 
sacred cannon closed, inspiration instantly drops 
into the character of a relic, a holy curiosity, as 
much to be remanded to the museum as meteoric 
iron in the sphere of the mineral, or megatheria in 
that of the biological. On the contrary, inspiration 
is a permanent constituent of the entire matter ; 
only in one case it covers the Spirit of God going 
forth into the forms of lettered truth through the 
mind and hand of Jeremiah or of St. John ; in another 
case it covers the Spirit of God going forth into 
forms of thought, feeling, purpose, and power 
through the personal instrumentality of such an 



THE SECRET OF POWER. 57 

one as Abraham, David, Thomas a Kempis, Wesley, 
or any of us whose heart is so keyed to the mind of 
God as to be able to vibrate with the tones of his 
Spirit ; like the aeolian harp which is so delicately 
strung as to tremble melodiously in the presence of 
the great spirit of music that lurks inaudible in the 
air. Inspired power to write a divine Bible; in- 
spired power to live a divine life ; inspired power to 
conceive or achieve a divine purpose — each of them 
is as a separate colored ray that issues into the air 
after its passage through the prism of the human 
spirit ; but one of these just as much as another 
sprung out of the original white beam of the Spirit 
of God. 

To be a Christian, then, I say, is to live with a 
divine life ; and to secure that result is the object 
which God had in giving to us a book — an instru- 
ment, therefore, whose prime value lies only in its 
competency to contribute to the realization and 
maintenance in men of the Spirit of God as the law 
and the material of life. 

Men early broke away from God ; tried to become 
human animals only ; to keep the casket and to put 
the jewel at the pawnbroker's ; hid behind the trees 
in the garden — a picture six thousand years old, but 
as true and fresh as when first painted ; tried to live 
a life, not that had no idea of God in it, but that 
had no God in it, which is another matter. Revela- 
tion began then, and, under one form or another, 



58 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

has continued until this morning, with the intent of 
reconnecting that which by sin had become discon- 
nected ; to complete the circuit, so that man's heart 
shall flash with God's light and beat with God's life, 
become a vivid crumb of incarnation — each man 
competent to become spiritually leafy, flowery, and 
fruity because abiding in the divine vine ; every man 
a true live branch of God ; a son of God because 
born of God ; enshrining a spark of God's life ; a 
particular avatar. These broken sentences are only 
an attempt to think at the level of God's thought as 
Christ has stated it, and as some of Christs's men 
and women have tried to live it — yes, and have suc- 
ceeded in living it. We are going to get along 
vastly better, quarrel a great deal less with ourselves 
and a great deal less with other people, if we let 
Christianity mean a great deal to us than if we let it 
mean only an easy little. It will never make much 
of us unless we make much of it. 

God's desire and design being, then, to become in 
men a governing and actuating presence, the Bible 
is a record of some of the attempts that he has made 
to accomplish that design — attempts that have 
varied greatly according to the circumstances of the 
diversified peopks with whom he has had to deal, 
and the altered times during which his efforts to that 
end have been prosecuted. Such an appreciation of 
the case on our part involves in it very distinct con- 
victions as to the unequal value of different portions 



THE SECRET OF POWER. 59 

of the Bible, considered as a storehouse of present 
spiritual pabulum. We believe in the Old Testa- 
ment. And not only that, we believe in the inspira- 
tion of the Old Testament — meaning by inspiration 
exactly what St. Peter meant when he said that it 
was the production of holy men of God w T ho spoke 
as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. But, 
granting all of that, because the Book of Leviticus, for 
example, was inspired, it does not necessarily follow 
that we, and the children in our homes and Sunday 
Schools to-day, cannot be more nutritiously employed 
than in the attempt to masticate and digest the 
Book of Leviticus. 

We are seeking to have established and main- 
tained, in ourselves and in our children, the Divine 
Spirit as the controlling principle of life ; and 
because the way of accomplishing this, narrated in 
Leviticus, was good for the Hebrews three thousand 
five hundred years ago, it does not follow that it is 
the thing for us to-day. Even things that God 
makes wear out ; even institutions that he originates 
may have only a temporary existence ; and even 
Scripture, that his own Spirit has inspired, may 
possess only a provisional value. God inspired the 
architecture of the ark ; but even if we had the ark 
back again, and old Noah to captain it, and Shem 
as first mate, it would stand no chance beside a 
Cunarder; and people who believe that the ark's 
build and proportions were divinely prescribed 



60 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

would be as shy about going aboard of her as any- 
body else ; and their shyness would be perfectly 
consistent with an intelligent faith in that inspira- 
tion. 

The Holy Spirit is not dated, but the particular 
forms into which that Spirit throws itself bear 
marks both of time and locality. We read the Old 
Testament at every Sabbath service, morning and 
evening; but, as has been distinctly stated, the 
prime purpose of such selection is to open wide the 
door for a New Testament selection to follow it. 
We gain a wealthier sense of the new covenant by 
prefacing it with samplings from the old covenant 
which it has displaced. To this end the imprecatory 
psalms make a capital prelude to our Lord's prayer 
of intercession ; and the presentiments of Isaiah 
bring out in only more impressive relief the full-blos- 
somed consciousness of St. John and St. Paul. The 
two Testaments are pertinent to distinct times, and 
are not in the same way relevant to all times ; and 
we confuse things when we treat them as though 
they were. If now (as is the custom in a good 
many of our Sunday schools) — if now six months of 
the Sunday school year be devoted to the Old Tes- 
tament by itself, and the other six months to the 
New Testament, the only impression that is possible 
to be left upon the mind of either the young or the 
adult pupils is that, no matter where in the Bible a 
thing occurs, no matter when a thing was written or 



THE SECRET OF POWER. 61 

who wrote it, it is all of it equally relevant to the mat- 
ter of Christian character and life. 

The Old Testament is inspired narrative of the 
world's first steps in holiness, and some of those 
steps exceedingly short and shambling, and if you 
crowd back either yourselves or your children or 
your pupils on to those records, and try to make 
them a true constituent part of to-day's nurture, you 
are only trying to make people walk in twilight 
after the sun is risen ; you are only keeping them 
thumbing the primer after they are competent to 
read more difficult sentences that are loaded with a 
riper, richer meaning. 

Without doubt the Old Testament is the founda- 
tion of the New. So the basement of your house, 
with its encompassing masonry, makes out the 
foundation of the stories above ; but that is not a 
reason why you should spend twelve hours every 
day down cellar. Certainly the Old Testament has 
a gospel reference and is full of anticipatory sugges- 
tion ; and if it can be taught in a way to exhibit 
that character, there is a great deal to be said for 
it. But even that is surveying the gospel through 
presentiments that are hundreds and in some in- 
stances thousands of years old ; and any glorious 
prospect that you are permitted to stand in the 
immediate presence of, you are not going to retreat 
from fifty or a hundred miles for the purpose of 



62 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

surveying it through a telescope, even though that 
telescope were the handiwork of God himself. 

I appreciate how many cleavage lines there are in 
all this into which shafts of criticism can be thrust. 
The only thing in it all that I care to stand for is 
that the Old Testament is not the latest thing out. 
What we want is the last dispatch. Monday's 
paper is not news after Tuesday's paper is on the 
street. Better let the Old Testament entirely alone 
than handle it in such a way as to leave the impres- 
sion that old and new are all of one piece, and 
that piece of a homogeneous texture. God made 
Mosaism pure and simple, and God made Gospel 
pure and simple ; but he never made a conglomerate 
of the two, as is done by preachers and Sunday 
School teachers every Sabbath of the year. No 
man was ever more thoroughly steeped in Judaism 
than was St. Paul before his conversion ; but the 
secret of St. Paul's hold upon his own times and all 
the centuries since was that in his conversion he 
was wholly taken possession of by the spirit of the 
new covenant of faith, and, in consequence, the old 
covenant of works was driven out of him as a dead 
thing; and wherever you find a man all over 
engrossed with the single idea of an immanent 
Christ, and all over mastered by the undivided 
imperialism of an immanent Christ, you get some of 
St. Paul back again, and little patches of Luther and 



THE SECRET OF POWER. 63 

the German Reformation springing up all around 
him. " The law," said St. Paul, " is a schoolmaster 
to bring us to Christ," and adds that when we get to 
Christ we don't want any more schoolmaster. To 
be a Christian is not simply to behave with pro- 
priety ; it is to live after the power of a divinely 
quickened and renewed life ; and specific statutes 
and carnal ordinances are not even tangent to the 
genius of the matter, though scratched on granite 
by the very finger of God. 

The kingdom of God is not in word, but in power. 
So much for the old word ; now a little about the 
new — what we call the gospel. 

Recognizing the imperialism of the Divine Spirit 
working in us as the quintessence of the entire matter 
will be likely to shift a little the angle at which even 
New Testament Scripture stands to us. It is very 
difficult to recover from the notion and the supersti- 
tion that a written Bible is some how the very sub- 
stance of our holy religion, and that the written New 
Testament is the gospel. We may have read a 
thousand times those words of St. Paul in the First 
of Romans, " The gospel of Christ is the power of 
God unto salvation," without realizing that, when 
he stated that, the gospel was entirely without 
written documents. 

It is almost as difficult for us to break loose from 
the fascination of the letter as it was for the Scribes 
and Pharisees in the time of Jesus. In his epistle to 



64 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

the Corinthians the Apostle writes : " The letter 
killeth, but the spirit giveth life ;" and then we go 
about imagining that it was only the " letter," in its 
connection with the old covenant that had in it 
such possibilities of peril. We set up a truth, enun- 
ciate it or letter it as definitely as we can, line it as 
sharply as we know how, and then, because the 
truth happens to have been taken from the right 
hand instead of the left hand of the apocrypha, 
suppose that it is not a case of " letter " at all, 
but of " spirit," as though the question were only 
which covenant it came from, and not whether it 
had been tied up into a hard knot of hempen sen- 
tence. 

The kingdom of God is not in word, but in power ; 
it may be a word in Chronicles or a word in the 
record of St. John; word is not kingdom, power is 
kingdom. Words, even the words of the Lord are 
only shapes out into which his spirit runs and tries 
to give token of its presence and might. The writ- 
ten pages from Matthew to Revelation did not 
make Christianity ; Christianity made the written 
pages from Matthew to Revelation. Words are 
the accident of the matter. Christ wrote nothing, and 
gave no orders to his disciples to write anything. 
It is easier to carry a book around in our pocket 
than it is to carry God's Spirit around in our life, 
and that explains a good deal of the bookishness of 
the entire business. But gospel, all shifts aside, is 



THE SECRET OF POW^rt. 65 

power. Gospel, all shifts aside, is life, divine life. 
Jesus Christ is the gospel. " I am ? the way; I am 
the truth ; I am the life ; I am the whole thing," 
said he ; and to-day, this morning, here in this 
church, to be a Christian is not to know a book, but 
to be knit into the Son of God. There was no book 
in St. John's piety, or in St. Peter's or in St. Paul's. 
I know whom I have believed," not what I have 
believed. 

This of course is not to recommend the disuse of 
the Christian Scriptures. They subserve a necessary 
purpose. They are highway over which men are to 
be led to Christ — Christ who is the same presence 
and certain power to-day that he was when he trod 
the streets of Jerusalem and the country roads of 
Galilee. The error does not lie in using the written 
records as an instrument, but in treating them as 
a finality — in treating them as a substitute for 
Christ ; a something to be used because we can do 
nothing better ; a record of what Christ used to do 
when he was here, and to be made much of because 
we can do nothing better ; a record of what Christ 
used to do when he was here, and to be made much 
of because he is gone and isn't doing anything here 
now. Whether we have ever thought that all out 
in words or not, the presence of that idea in the 
air lies all about us as a stupefying anodyne. We 
are in danger of trying to live on an inspired descrip- 
tion of Christ and a verbal photograph of him in- 



66 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

stead of succeeding in living on Christ. There is a 
Bible worship which is idolatry, and puts a written 
image in Christ's stead, making the Bible an idol of 
the Lord instead of an open door conducting to his 
presence. 

We cannot live on a history — even an inspired 
history. We cannot browse on antiquity and grow 
fat — even a divine antiquity. Christ told his disci- 
ples that it was expedient for them that he go away ; 
to their advantage that he go away, because he 
would send his spirit instead. Instead of taking 
warm and obedient hold upon the divine presence 
which he said he would send, there is a good deal of 
likelihood that we shall go no further than to take 
hold upon the written scriptures which he never 
said anything about sending. The Apostle's creed, 
which we so often repeat, says, u I believe in the 
Holy Ghost/* but in that creed there is not one 
word from beginning to end about the Holy Scrip- 
tures. Let it be said again that our criticism is not 
against the Scriptures, but against putting the 
Scriptures In the place of the Lord, as though 
they were the best thing we could have, and the 
only thing really that has survived from him to 
our own generation. 

This is a thoughtful age ; men are brainy ; all 
about us there is a passion for new ideas; but our 
most urgent necessity is not of idea, but of power : 
what we need most is not schooling, but baptism. 



THE SECRET OF POWER. 67 

The real gospel that is in the world to-day is 
not the Scriptures, but Christ and them that are 
alive in him. We are not quite arrived at the 
domain of what deserves to be called faith till we 
are passed over from the region of idea into that 
of power. Faith is not assent to any theory of 
Scripture, or to anything that Scripture contains, or 
to all that it contains. Faith is not so much a con- 
dition wherein we hold to something or somebody 
as that in which we are held by something or some- 
body. It is not holding a doctrine, but being held 
by a person. The magnetized filings stick to the 
steel not because they try so hard to stick, but 
because the steel has captured them. 

Xo man has got to the earnest part of the matter, 
nor to the safe part of it, till he has found out for 
himself that Christianity does not consist in holding 
religious opinions that he can let go of, but in being 
held in the strong embrace of God, who has no 
intention of letting go of him. Ideas wear out and 
lose their grip ; no man is proof against dying an 
agnostic or an atheist till he has been pentecosted. 
A child's faith as toward his mother is not faith that 
what his mother says is true : it is faith in his 
mother ; the hiding of himself in the bundle of one 
life that enwraps them both, so that he lives in the 
sweep of her inspiration, and grows up toward man- 
hood by the appropriation of personal vigor, wis- 
dom, and sweetness hourly made over to him from 



68 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

her. And that is cast in the same mold as gospel 
faith, which is as a cord by which the living Christ 
holds the living believer to himself. It is not a 
rope of idea, nor a shred of sentiment, nor a strand 
of aspiration, but it is an ingraft by which we 
become hid with Christ in God, so that our deeds 
become divine apocalypse and our lives God's 
blossoms. 

The time come speedily, O God, when that type 
of Christianity shall prevail among us; when we 
shall give over quibbling about the small matters of 
it all ; when words shall be understood by us to be 
but the types of realities ; when formula and cere- 
monial shall be respected as being but the shadow 
of thy form and the fringe of thy garment ; when 
even the Holy Word shall be reverenced as being 
no more than the suggestion of thy glory and the 
outer court of thy presence ; our faith be not a hold- 
ing to things, nor even a holding to thee, but a 
being held by thee, so that alike in inward thought 
and outward act we shall be under thy dominance, 
our lives the small reflection of thine, and so instinct 
with the eternal Spirit of Christ that our presence, 
because thou art in it, shall tell upon men divinely, 
and our touch, because thou art in it, become to 
them the conveyance of Gospel light, liberty, and 
life ! 



V 

And Adam and His Wife Hid Themselves 
from the Presence of the Lord God Amongst 
the Trees of the Garden. — Geftesis iii:S. 

fHE garden of the Lord concealed from Adam 
and Eve the Lord of the garden. Your own 
minds, I am sure, will have a quick presentiment of 
what that foreshadows, and of the truth, half con- 
cealed, and half told, in this antique imagery. The 
subject is recent and relevant to the new world, 
although in our verse put upon canvas in colors that 
are Oriental. The garden of the Lord concealed 
from Adam and Eve the Lord of the garden. It 
became an instant question therefore either of more 
Lord or of less garden. The Lord himself chose 
between the alternatives, and out among the thorns 
and thistles the race began to evolve from the god- 
lessness in which by the luxuriance and deliciousness 
of paradise they had first become involved. 

This pictorial story is so true to present facts, it 
seems strange it should ever have been discredited 
as a just record of original facts. Like Janus, it 
looks both ways. The &ir was so full of verdure 

(69) 



70 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

that it turned blue into green and barred out the 
sky. God and Adam were on opposite sides of the 
trees. The creature swallowed the Creator. The 
gift rubbed out the Giver. God did not turn Adam 
out of paradise till Adam had turned God out. The 
luxury of the garden thronged the ground and 
loaded the air. Adam was incompetent to contain 
God and the garden at the same time. It is danger- 
ous to be comfortable. Being so cosily and deli- 
ciously fixed cost Adam his piety and then his integ- 
rity. The story becomes, then, like a mirror made so 
many years ago that discrepant legends have gath- 
ered about its construction, yet if you look into the 
mirror it returns your face to you as fairly and faith- 
fully as it did that of its manufacturer a millennium 
ago. 

It is a long lesson to learn to be able to keep the 
garden of the Lord, and the Lord of the garden 
both. Adam stumbled over the lesson, and we, his 
remote progeny, are still conning and tussling with 
it. We hope to be able to get along in the new gar- 
den when it comes, with all the elegance of furnish- 
ing and deliciousness of fruition it may be garnished 
withal ; but as yet conveniences are perilous ; to be 
more than about so comfortable is hazardous; 
the tree easily becomes bigger than the Lord, and 
our problem is still that of the Hebrews — how we 
can enjoy the quails and at the same time be kept 
from leanness of soul. Adam was skuttled by the 



THE GARDEN OF THE LORD. 71 

devil of luxury, and swamped in the sea of his own 
felicities. "And Adam and his wife hid themselves 
from the presence of the Lord God amongst the 
trees of the garden." 

Adam's felicities were of an innocent nature to be 
sure. It was not apples of Sodom, but God's own 
apples of knowledge that he tasted, and in the very 
thick of God's woods that he and God became sepa- 
rated from each other: which is one of the clever 
touches in the picture. It was a clear part of the 
painter's intent to have us understand that it was 
not poison, but good, wholesome food that ruined 
Adam ; and that it was not one of his own wicked 
inventions, but God's own garden-verdure and lux- 
uriance that, practically, emptied Eden of the divine 
nearness and presence. So closely did Adam cleave 
to it that the Maker's own tree concealed from him 
the tree's own Maker. There is no blessing so 
blessed that the unilluminated side of it will not fall 
off and darken down into a curse. All the planets 
that dance even about the sun are black on their off 
side. The better a thing is, the more harm it is cap- 
able of doing. The pillar of cloud differed from the 
pillar of fire not in identity but in circumstance. 
Security is prolific in peril, and the best of things 
may be mother to bad effects. So that when we are 
trying to avoid Adam's mistakes, in our own little 
paradise, we shall need hot only to keep one eye on 
the serpent that has crawled in from without, but 



72 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

also to deal very warily with the trees that God has 
himself planted in the garden, and the apples, even 
the apples of wisdom and the apples of life, that 
God's own fingers have hung upon their branches. 
It is often a matter of wonderment with us that 
God allows his people, so many of them, to be so 
distressed. If, indeed, He is an omnipotent and 
eff ectionate Father, why is it that he does not create 
about us gardens of comfort and luxuriance, instead 
of pasturing us upon wildernesses characteristic for 
nothing so much as their barrenness ? A lesson that 
I learn more of almost every day is, how much of 
anguish there is in human lives, either expressed, or 
more likely undivulged, or more likely still, undi- 
vulgeable. My friends. I judge from experience, 
from observation, and from the tenor of scripture, 
that we have even now more comfort than we can 
get along with to advantage. There comes to me 
quite frequently from the distressed and bereaved 
the request to be remembered in the prayers of God's 
people. I confess to you frankly that I believe those 
of us who are not afflicted need vastly more praying 
for than those who are. Sometime we are going to 
thank God more fervently for what have been our 
subtractions, than we now do for our additions, and 
learn to read every cross as a plus sign. More grace 
is needed to keep a prosperous man erect than one 
who is unprospered. It has occurred over and over 
again, just in the midst of this congregation, during 



THE GARDEN OF THE LORD. 73 

the last half dozen years, that a man has had to be 
driven out of his garden into a sand lot and a 
thistlefield before he could recover his manhood and 
find his God again. 

Like the Hebrews, we pray for quails and very 
likely get them, and along with them get something 
we did not pray for, and something, too, that is a good 
deal harder to lose than quails are to catch. 
"Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth," which is 
another way of saying that when the garden has be- 
come so packed with trees, and the air so clustered 
with blossoms as to keep the daylight from sifting 
in, he cuts a swath through the midst of the garden, 
that we may be reminded again that there is a sky 
as well as a ground, and that down upon some of 
the verdure that remains, rifts may be opened 
through which the heavenly light shall touch and 
play. Am I mistaken in thinking that there are some 
garden-plots right in our midst that have grown up 
so rich and rank that the very verdure has come to 
intervene and hide between the tenants of the gar- 
den and the Lord of the garden ? 

Thoughtful and devout minds have felt this, and 
have tried to escape the peril it involves ; have 
sometimes done of themselves what Adam had done 
for him, exchanged their garden for a wilderness; 
voluntarily renouncing life's cofnforts and amenities. 
It is easy to satirize the absurdity of such renuncia- 
tion ; but whether it is absurd or not depends ; de- 



74 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

pends upon whether the luxuries are renounced 
because of the evil inherent in the luxuries, or be- 
cause they embarrass our attainment of benefits that 
are' of a still better and more necessary sort ; just as 
we would pluck up roses growing in a cornfield, not 
out of disrespect for or misappreciation of the roses, 
but because they absorb that strength of the soil 
that needs to be diverted to the maturing of the 
grain. And I am sure we shall be agreed with one 
another in this, that at this present time, peculiarly, 
there is growing in the midst of the ranks of stand- 
ing corn a profusion of roses, that however beauteous- 
ly they may diversify the field of grain, are neverthe- 
less sapping the vigor of the soil, and purchasing their 
own beauty at the expense of energy that ought to 
go to feed the blade, swell the ear, and round and 
color the full corn in the ear ; and that the garden of 
the Lord has become so compact in its verdure and 
so luscious in its bloom and fruitage as to crowd the 
air and fill the light, and that from us, too, the pro- 
geny of Adam, the garden of the Lord is concealing 
the Lord of the garden. 

Singular as may seem the statement, one of the 
greatest obstacles that Christianity has now to con- 
front is civilization. It is brought as a charge 
against the Gospel that its power over men varies in- 
versely with the civifizing results already wrought in 
their midst. There is a degree of truth in the 
charge. The same amount of evangelical work will 



THE GARDEN OF THE LORD. 75 

effect more religious results in a Fiji than in a New 
Yorker. A given amount of sowing will issue in 
larger harvests below 14th Street than it will above. 
The church is working its most rapid results on 
heathen soil. Foreign missionary work is yielding 
the best dividends in proportion to the amount of 
money invested. To a degree, then, the charge can 
be sustained, although there is nothing new or fresh 
in the charge and it involves no originality on the 
part of the plaintiff. It is all in the Book. Christ- 
ianity is doing in this century all that it claimed a 
competency to do in the first century. It is in fact 
in New York just what it was in promise in Jerusa- 
lem. Jesus worked almost uniformly at the mud- 
sills of society, endured the Sanhedrim, but courted 
the sinners and reclaimed the harlots. He civilized 
people, but avoided civilized people. 

Degradation is more accessible than respectability ; 
that is taught by the words of Christ and his 
apostles and by the example of their ministry. The 
Church has from the beginning been recruited first 
of all from the ranks of the unlettered, the unmon- 
eyed and the ignoble. The Christian Church is in 
this respect like a tree, that its roots are in the 
ground (more or less soiled therefore). When Paul 
wrote that " Not many wise men after the flesh, not 
many mighty, not many noble are called/' he allows 
the substance of the objection, and concedes that 
those influences of blood, money, manners and let- 



76 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

ters, rather indefinitely grouped under the term 
" civilization, " are a hindrance to the Gospel and an 
embarrassment to the Holy Ghost. This, however, 
consists perfectly with another fact : that there is no 
force that yields civilization so readily and prolifi- 
cally as Christianity does. Christianity is the 
mother of the best civilization, but like David, raises 
up a foe in her own house, and is in constant danger 
of being devoured by her own offspring. The very 
results yielded by Christianity, in the shape of res- 
pectability, and wealth, and power, and culture, and 
elegant refinements, come in to obscure the root 
itself out from which they are sprung. It is like a 
tree shaded and hindered by its own verdure. It is 
like the sun waking up the mists in the morning ; its 
beams like so many nimble fingers, weaving a veil to 
hang across the face of the sun, till it defeats its 
brightness by its own shining. We become indiffer- 
ent to the cause in our engrossment with its effects, 
and the old fact becomes true again, that the garden 
of the Lord conceals from us the Lord of the gar- 
den. 

One of the trees behind which the face of the 
Lord becomes hidden from us is the tree of knowl- 
edge. We shall mention only two or three of these 
briefly ; but there is propriety in mentioning that 
first. It is the first historic instance wherein a good 
thing demonstrated its capacity for mischief. It is 
the first card laid down by Satan in his long game of 



THE GARDEN OF THE LORD. 77 

trying to ruin men by the seductions of civilization. 
The tree was of God's planting to be sure, and 
knowledge is no doubt good ; but from the first the 
devil has been a learned devil, and has posed as the 
patron of erudition. " Eat of the fruit of the tree," 
he said, " and ye shall become as gods." That 
knowledge puffeth up," was known by Satan before 
it was stated by Paul. Knowledge is the fruit of 
the tree that stood in the very midst of the blessed 
garden ; but knowledge is regularly accompanied by 
its shadow in the shape of a consciousness of knowl- 
edge ; and consciousness of knowledge is on the neg- 
ative side of know-nothingism. 

Consciousness of knowledge is more stultifying than 
ignorance, and is essentially atheistic ; atheistic in 
this sense : that it converts present cognitions into a 
barrier that blocks the entrance of the heavenly 
light and thwarts the Holy Ghost. The tree grew in 
God's garden ; so our schools have been planted and 
fostered by the Christian Church. Still the multi- 
tudinousness of books, ideas, theories and philoso- 
phies, out into which the schools have blossomed, 
tends to work that intellectual complacency, and 
that conceit of knowledge, which blurs every 
heavenly vision, discredits the wisdom that is from 
above, and routs the Redeemer. "Not many wise 
men after the flesh are called." Athens bent to the 
Gospel with the condescending courtesy usual to 
elegant learning. The arrow aimed at the sun ends at 



78 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

last by pricking into the dirt. A college may be chris- 
tened with. Christian baptism only to become at 
length a smithy for the forging of spears to pierce 
afresh the side of the Crucified. Our science moth- 
ered by the Church, easily grows supercilious and 
blatant and turns matricide. Even the sun lifts the 
mist that befogs the sun. One single electric light 
out here on Madison Square extinguishes the stars, 
and the shining of the low-lying moon snuffs out 
all the constellations of the firmament. The garden 
of the Lord grows up at length into such prodigality 
of leaf and flower as to conceal the Lord of the 
garden. 

Another tree behind which the face of the Lord 
becomes hidden from us is that of affluence. There 
is an advantage in distinctly recognizing that as 
being likewise indigenous to paradisaic soil. Even 
Scripture takes pains to show its respect for men 
that are in comfortable possessions and repeatedly 
gives us detailed inventory of their assets. " Money 
answereth all things." The first African convert, 
Luke is interested to tell us, was chancellor of the 
Queen's exchequer. It seemed to gratify Luke to 
think how much money the Ethiopian was in the 
habit of handling. Even the dead body of our 
Lord was indebted to the rich Arimathean for a 
tomb to be buried in. It was not necessary for 
Matthew to say of him that he was a rich man of 
Arimathea, but he took an evident pleasure in it, 



THE GARDEN OF THE LORD. 79 

and the Holy Spirit that inspired him found nothing 
in the way of it. 

And there is no soil so fitting to foster this growth 
also, as Christian soil. In no company of a thou- 
sand people brought together outside of Gospel 
ground could you find so many men whose property 
counts up among the high figures as you can in the 
particular assembly that gathers, for example, in this 
particular church Sunday by Sunday. The tree of 
wealth verily like the tree of knowledge has its best 
rooting in the soil of paradise. We should no 
sooner think of speaking a disparaging word of 
money than we should of knowledge. But as knowl- 
edge trails behind it its shadow (as we have seen) so 
money is regularly attended by its shadow. Knowl- 
edge becomes conscious of itself and so atheizes. 
Wealth becomes conscious of itself and so atheizes. 
The sun lifts the mist that befogs the sun. It is not 
easy to become very learned without getting lost in 
the world of our own erudition. It is not easy to 
become very rich without becoming lost in the world 
of our acquisition. 

The Gospel has a hard stint to save either a phi- 
losopher or a millionaire. Money is just as holy a 
thing in one way as wisdom is in another. But it 
makes not the slightest difference how holy a thing 
is, if, like Adam, the Lord is on one side of it and 
you are on the other. And the more this conscious- 
ness of money is developed the more truly the man 



80 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

becomes encased in a little world that is all his own, 
and the more impervious to any influences that bear 
upon him from without. The verdure becomes so 
thick that the sky gets rubbed out, and the tree so 
broad and massive that the Lord God shrinks into in- 
visibility behind it. And although a tree in God's own 
garden, wealth operates still farther in the same di- 
rection by destroying sense of dependence upon 
the higher power. Animals are domesticated by 
hunger, and men religionized by bread-and-butter 
necessities. There is just a little incongruity in a 
man praying, " Give us this day our daily bread," 
when he is confident that he has already convertible 
assets ample to keep him in bread for a thousand 
years. Wealth induces a sense of sufficiency and of 
young almightiness that checkmates the Gospel and 
embarrasses the blessed Spirit. This, then, is another 
illustration of the way in which civilization, although 
the outcome of the Gospel, nevertheless naturally 
works back discouragingly upon the Gospel. 

I mention only one other tree in God's garden, 
and that is the tree of respectability. More evi- 
dently, perhaps, than either of the others, it is the 
outcome of heavenly soil. The Gospel has always 
displayed a surpassing power in diffusing ideals of 
excellent behavior, in grappling with the coarser 
lusts of men, and taming them into habits of regular- 
ity and propriety. At the same time, when a man 
by the impact of the truth, or by the pressure of senti- 



THE GARDEN OF THE LORD. 81 

ment, or by the fear of consequences, but without 
having been interiorly and vitally renewed, has had 
just enough outward effect produced upon him to 
start in him an incipient and callow sense of good- 
ness ; such a man composes the very toughest ma- 
terial with which the Gospel has to contend. Such 
a little streak of conscious excellence when exposed 
to the convicting truth of God's Word, or power of 
God's Spirit, like a glittering rod pushed up into 
the electricity will convey off in silent serenity the 
most terrific bolt out of the sky that can be hurled 
against it. 

I dread respectability more than I dread original 
sin. The devil of decency is more incorrigible than 
the devil of dirt. The hardest man in college to 
teach anything is a sophomore, because he knows 
just enough to tickle his vanity without knowing 
sufficient to appreciate the brilliant reach of his stu- 
pidity ; which is precisely analogous to the class of 
people I have just now in mind; good enough to en- 
joy their goodness but neither quite good enough 
nor quite bad enough to know that the only hope 
for them is in being inwardly renewed and thorough- 
ly born again. I would rather, as a minister of the 
Gospel, deal with a man that has no taint of decency 
about him, than to preach to one inwardly unrenewed 
but treated to an outw r ard "wash" of elegant propri- 
eties, what the Lord called whited sepulchres, white- 
washed charnel-houses ; and I am stating in my words 



82 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 



only what the Lord said in his words to the silver- 
plated Scribes and Pharisees, "The publicans and the 
harlots go into the Kingdom of God before you." 

These are three of the trees, then, Wisdom, Wealth 
and Decency, behind which we hide and lose the vis- 
ibility of the Lord. Good, all of them, sprung from 
holy soil, but sufficient either of them to hide from 
us the face of the Almighty God when He is upon 
one side of them and we upon the other. In this 
way civilization, the first begotten and well-beloved 
child of Christianity, stands with poniard drawn to 
thrust into the bosom of its own mother. 

I want to say only one closing word to the men 
and women here that are Christians. Whether, or 
not, current civilization is to be erased, and history 
started again in some new thorn-pasture and thistle- 
bed, beyond the cherubim and outside the gate and 
the flaming sword, God only knows. But you see 
our danger and you see our hope. The trees are 
growing up rank; the verdure is profuse; the air is 
clustered with blossom, but the Lord is in the gar- 
den; keep in the range of the Lord's eye. If you 
have money, bless God for it, but keep on God's side 
of it, not shrivel in the eclipse made by it when you 
hide on the off-side of it; and if you can't keep your 
money and your God both, let God take away your 
money before your money takes away your God. 
Pretty soon we shall lose our money anyway, and 
then we shall be poor indeed, standing up before the 



THE GARDEN OF THE LORD. 83 

great white throne with no money and no God eith- 
er; no bankstocks and no corner-lots here and no 
mansion either in the new city on high. 

The Great Lord save our civilization and save us 
from the power of our civilization ; keep us where we 
can see His face and hear his voice in spite of the 
trees ! But, at any rate, the Lord save our race and 
save our country, more trees or fewer; fill the air 
with his presence, shoot rays of light through the 
leaves and between the blossoms, our eye look stead- 
ily into his eye, and we, the tenants of the garden, 
walk evermore in obedient and loving fellowship 
with the blessed Lord of the garden ! 



VI 



/ Being in the Way, the Lord Led Me. — Genesis 

xxiv : 27. 

LIEZER had found Rebekah. Eliezer had had 
something to do with it. The Lord had had 
something to do with it. I being in the way, the 
Lord led me. God's providence and man's relations 
to it. 

God's prevision and God's provision are matters 
which in this presence need no debate ; they are 
with us settled facts, bedded in the body of our 
Christian faith. David says, in the twenty-third 
psalm, " He leadeth me ;" and that voices Christian 
sentiment still and everywhere ! " He leadeth me." 
It will be to our advantage if we can come closer to 
what is already our own faith in the matter, and if 
we can succeed in reducing that faith to a more 
helpful and working relation to daily straits and 
difficulties, for there is of course no use in a faith 
that we cannot use. 

Nothing will then be more suitable or consistent 
with our theme, than to ask of thee, O Lord, in 

(W 



UNCONSCIOUS FAITH. 85 

whose hands are all our ways, and from whom are the 
preparations of the heart in man, that thou wilt go 
before us in all of our thinking, and guide us in all our 
searchings after the truth. We plead before thee 
thine own promise — " In all thy ways acknowledge 
me and I will direct thy paths." And thus estab- 
lished in the line of thy choice may we at the end 
of our study have it to say with thy servant by the 
side of the well in the city of Nahor — " I being in 
the way, the Lord led me." 

I have heard it said that it is one of the effects of 
plowing that it puts the soil in such condition as 
that it draws towards the surface the moisture that 
has already been in the ground, but lying deeper 
down. That, I suspect, is quite akin to the effect 
produced upon us by much of our best preaching 
and Bible study, not that it actually increases our 
faith always, but that it operates to draw T toward the 
surface and make matter of our own conscious expe- 
rience the faith that has been already existing in- 
wardly, an invisible basis of support, a subterranean 
fountain of supply. 

Our globe lies unsuspectingly in the great open 
hand of its Creator; and with almost as little sus- 
picion, a great deal of the time, our lives nestle in 
the large, open hand of our fatherly Provider. I 
have vast faith in men's unconscious faith in God and 
in his provident care. We certainly realize very 
imperfectly the religious instincts and impulses that 



86 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

do quietly go on framing themselves together inside 
our minds, so laying the massive but unseen basis of 
much of our outward act and effort. It is only now 
and then that something transpires that shoots 
within us a sudden line of light, and gives us momen- 
tary glimpse of what is lying in our mind silently and 
working there stealthily ; as a flash of lightning in 
the night-time outlines before us for a quick instant 
the form that is flitting past us in the darkness. 

And this by no means holds of our religious in- 
stincts alone. We are not extemporizing a theory of 
unconscious faith to make good the deficiency of 
evident and realized faith. We are only asserting of 
the religious faculties what we can with entire confi- 
dence affirm and with perfect facility demonstrate of 
the rational faculties. There is no intellectual pro- 
cess pursued by us that does not conform to laws 
that we have not the wit to appreciate, and that 
does not involve instincts and considerations that we 
are not quick enough to see nor nimble enough to 
overtake. Our conclusions always imply more premise 
than we can put our hands on. Our conclusion may 
be valid, but it is very rarely safe to tell how we 
reached our conclusion. Thoughts creep in with a 
tread too velvety to be heard — flit through with a 
flash too swift to be counted. So simple a process, 
for example, as estimating with the eye the distance 
from us of the house across the street, involves visual 
adjustments and balancings, and complicated syllo- 



UNCONSCIOUS FAITH. 87 

gisms, that we have never suspected till we have 
once squarely questioned our estimates and at- 
tempted to get to the ground of them. The mind is 
full of facts and laws and movings that only occa- 
sionally and for an instant are seen by us under sun* 
shine. 

There is no end of illustrations that might be cited 
of the processes that go forward in our mind and 
heart determining and governing us, but of which, 
nevertheless, we are quite unconscious and unsus- 
picious. We are all of the time leaning upon supports 
without once thinking how much of our pressure we 
are really putting upon them till the support gives 
way or is removed. We may go through the day 
without once seeing the sun or thinking of it; yet 
from dawn to evening may not have had a thought 
which the sun's sheen did not brighten, nor an affec- 
tion which its beauty did not intensify. We rarely 
hear the clock tick, but are startled when it stops 
ticking. " Blessings brighten as they take their 
flight/' we say ; which is a way of confessing that we 
may have our lives greatly beautified and comforted 
without the joy of them ever becoming in us a full 
and defined thought. You love your wife and chil- 
dren, and yet you may go down town in the morning 
and from nine o'clock until five not have one distinct 
thought of any member of your household, and that, 
too, without being in the least chargeable with dis- 
loyalty to the household. But if that wife and those 



88 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

children should be removed from you, then in the 
midst of your employment you would soon discover 
how great a fact they had been in your life even in 
those hours when they had not been a definite object 
to your thought ; something as the sunlight itself 
may not for hours at a time be a distinct object of 
regard with you, and yet has the power of clothing 
with brightness and grace all those objects that stand 
in the sunlight. The conscious facts of our inner 
life make out but a very small part of our inner life. 
And to come a little closer to the matter immedi- 
ately in hand ; a little child is wondrously stayed and 
pacified by the presence with it or at least nearness 
to it of its own mother; and yet the child will go 
on contentedly with its toys quite a little apart from 
its mother, or even in a room adjoining that in 
which its mother is, provided the door be left open, 
and perhaps for an hour or more keep quietly busy 
about its play, till something startles it into an appre- 
hension that mother may not be close by. Now the 
explanation of all that is very simple and instructive. 
It is not quite fair to say that the child had forgot- 
ten its mother; nor can we say with exactness that 
the child has had any thought of its mother ; and yet 
it had all that time been stayed and quieted by its 
faith in its mother's nearness, a faith strong enough 
to keep it from disquiet and anxiety, and yet not so 
strong as to rise up in the child's mind to the pre- 
cision of a .distinct thought ; a kind of walking in the 



UNCONSCIOUS FAITH. 89 

twilight which may be bright enough for us to be 
able to pick our steps with care and safety, and yet 
not so bright as to set us thinking at all of the sunken 
sun to whose presence behind the hills the evening 
twilight is all due., 

That is what we mean by unconscious faith in God 
and in his provident care. It is like certain deep 
organ notes which are too positive to be called 
silence, but too unsubstantial to be called a tone; a 
diffusive breath, rather, which lies about among the 
chords, blending all in one close conspiracy of sweet 
sound. And most of our confidence in the leadings 
of God is of this unconscious kind. There is notlv 
ing to indicate that Eliezer in all his long journey 
out to Mesopotamia leaned in any other way upon 
the arm of God than did the child playing in the next 
room find support in the nearness of its mother. In 
this matter of faith in the wise and affectionate gov- 
ernment of God I am confident we are all of us more 
religious and Christian than the sharp analysis of 
our thought at any given instant might lead us to 
infer. Love does not consist in the consciousness of 
our love, nor faith in the consciousness of faith. The 
sea draws toward the moon though its waters do not 
know it. The planets bend to the sun though re- 
volving in profound unconsciousness of it. It is not 
the best part of our health that we know that our 
pulse is beating or know that the processes of respi- 
ration and digestion are steadily maintained. The 



90 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

finest element in our loyalty to our friends is not 
that we tell them that we love them or even that we 
think as much in distinct and precise thought. 
Young lovers are all the time telling each other how 
much they love one another ; but as they grow older 
and love each other more they tell each other less. 
The most tell-tale thing about a boy's confidence in 
his father is not his telling him how much trust he has 
in him, but the unconscious working of his fingers as 
his little hand tries to get a snugger hold of his fath- 
er's larger hand. So that we are not to estimate our 
own faith or that of others by the amount of verbal 
demonstration that we make or hear. 

I am confident that in society generally and in the 
world at large there is to-day no instinct that works 
in men's minds with more constancy and power than 
just this confidence in a supreme and governing in- 
telligence. It is the silent postulate that underlies 
our thinking; it is the impalpable axiom that under- 
girds our purpose and our estimates. When the child 
creeps along to the open door, looks through and 
finds its mother gone, it utters a sharp cry, which 
shows the difference between unconscious faith and 
having nothing to put faith in. If it is the case that 
any one here has so little consciousness of a divine 
presence and guidance that he supposes that he is 
really getting along without God, and that there is 
none, were it possible for him to look through some 
open door and discover that there is in the next room 



UNCONSCIOUS FAITH. 91 

nothing answering to mother or father he would 
utter the same sharp cry because it would be the 
sudden removal of a support upon which all men, 
unconsciously at least, are leaning. And it is full of 
instruction just at this point, that while so many in 
our day are atheistically inclined, they stop as a rule 
at agnosticism. 

And now you will see how perfectly our illustra- 
tion of the next room explains the spirit and animus 
of agnosticism. Agnosticism shuts the door into the 
next room, but takes care not to drive out of the next 
room anybody that may be there. Agnosticism is 
atheism becoming a little irresolute and lonely al- 
ready before its expurgated edition of the universe is 
complete. Agnosticism is philosophic attempts at 
irreligion compromising with the ineradicable exi- 
gencies of man's soul. But in matters of such mo- 
ment compromise will not work. There are in- 
stances in which medium ground is no ground. A 
strait is not a sea but an avenue betw r een two seas. 
The prodigal not lived, but waited, among the swine 
till he should conclude to go farther or go back. The 
husks of agnosticism grow on the watershed that 
slopes in one direction toward hell (hell on earth I 
mean), and in the other toward home. There are in- 
dications that the lost boy is thinking about his 
father. 

And almost all of us know how easily our uncon- 
scious faith in the care and guidance of God is 



92 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

aroused into a thoughtful and conscious faith. The 
plowshare readily brings the moisture to the surface. 
Elijah prayed as he came to the end of his journey 
and the evening gathered. Occasions do not make 
reverence nor create faith, but reveal it. Our Sun- 
day, our church, reminds us from week to week of 
our forgotten confidence in God. We lean upon 
him all the week; on Sunday, even if on no other 
day, we review our faith and with a distinct thought 
and confidence yield ourselves again to the leader- 
ship of the good Shepherd. One prayer stirs in 
every pew the instincts of prayer. One song of 
thanksgiving becomes in a thousand hearts a hymn 
of praise. Our faith takes no vacation however our 
consciousness of it may. The still harp-strings lie 
full of music. 

But as an instrument is improved by being played 
upon, so also the chords of our confidence in God by 
being touched come to yield a stronger, finer quality 
of confidence. So that our trust in the supreme 
wisdom gains from everything that reminds us of 
our trust. Hence the advantage of our Sundays and 
our churches. In our prayers we find our faith. 
Strong men who have been all the week long 
bound on the torturing rack of a fluctuating market 
come in here and join in the doxology. The dox- 
ology is itself a confession of faith set to music : 
" Praise God from whom all blessings flow," — a con- 
fession of God and of his beneficent providence ; and 



UNCONSCIOUS FAITH. 93 

in that confession of faith men find their faith once 
more. In the same way they come in and join in 
the Lord's prayer, which is also a creed as well as a 
prayer, and withal they have been straining every 
nerve all the week long to meet perhaps the needs of 
their own life and their family, they bow in the 
house of God and say, " Give us this day our daily 
bread. " And in the confession of their faith they 
find their faith, and feel their faith ; heaven is nearer, 
God means more, men's ways are divinely shaped. 
" He leadeth me." 

It is easy to believe, in the filled sanctuary and 
before the open record. The moisture is just below 
the plowshare. And then the church edifice in its 
exterior structure as well as interior services is de- 
signed to be the same sort of reminder of faith that 
is in us. The tower of our own church springing far 
up into the sky is itself the Apostle's creed in stone, 
at least the first clause of it — " I believe in God." 
" I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence 
cometh my help," said David. The church spire 
pointing on high stands out in the daylight, the even- 
ing light and the night light, not to lift our eyes 
unto the hills from whence cometh our help, but 
unto the sky from whence cometh our help. 

All these things are arranged not so much to give 
us new faith as to bring us close to the faith we have. 
The same wholesome discipline comes to us by our 
contact with men whose faith in the heavenly Provi- 



94 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

dence is warm and earnest. They do not give us 
their faith but they strengthen ours. We gain faith 
by their touch as steel gains magnetism by the touch 
of a magnet ; they stir the instinct of faith that is al- 
ready in us waiting to be stirred. Because we be- 
lieve in the fatherhood of God already we can have 
our belief reinforced by their belief. 

Great events remind us of God and of our faith in 
Him. Strong, earnest moods of mind easily set us 
in near relation with a heavenly guide and provident 
shepherd. The best and deepest meaningsofhistory 
as of nature come out only when seen against a di- 
vine background. To leave out God is to draw a 
wet sponge across the best things that history has to 
say. The history of a century, of a millennium as 
such, means nothing unless intelligence that sub- 
tends the millennium puts a meaning into it. Mind 
cannot read what mind has not first written. All in- 
terpreting of history proceeds on the quiet assump- 
tion of a mind that has worked its thought and built 
its purpose into history. In this way the study of 
history helps us to find our faith and feel our faith. 
The mind of the reader and writer meet on the 
printed page. So in our efforts to interpret events 
the mind that construes touches the mind that con- 
structs. And especially, as I said, does this hold of 
the great and stirring events of history. It is the 
effect of a great disaster not only that it humbles us 
but humbles us before God ; of a great victory not 



UNCONSCIOUS FAITH. 95 

only that it exalts us but exalts us before God. We 
have known how when an entire nation is stricken it 
is involuntary *with us to carry our crape into our 
churches and our tears into our sermons. Such oc- 
currences have in them a power to make the divine 
very real and our dependence upon the divine very 
actual and very conscious. The poets have a way of 
calling the mountains divine ; so events that slope 
up in colossal proportion from the common level of 
occurrence seem always in the like way freighted 
with supernal import. 

We are also reminded of our faith by the events 
and crises of our life. Peter lost and found his faith 
in the same instant when he cried, " Lord, save or I 
perish." If we are appalled hy the insignificance of 
the occurrences of life and suspect they are beneath 
the notice and care of supreme wisdom, we have to 
remember that even the wisest men are also the ones 
that can most easily change the focus of their regard 
and adjust it to the minuter as well as larger in- 
terests of life. We must remember, too, that the lit- 
tle things of nature show the same refinement and 
exquisiteness of skill as those that are more impos- 
ing, and that the same sunshine which makes the 
planets to glow in the celestial spaces tints also the 
flowers in your dooryard, and brightens to whiteness 
the snowfiake that drifts athwart your window. 

Anything that stirs us out of the monotonies of life 
and lifts us from grooves, throws us out more con- 



W THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

sciously upon the support of the divine arms. When- 
ever we find ourselves suddenly confronting the un- 
known, it moves our faith, and if not makes us pray, 
stirs the instincts that are all the time waiting to 
break forth into prayer. The going down of the sun 
in a gentle and plaintive way sets us face to face 
with the future, and the evening hour is therefore 
naturally a praying hour. Eliezer prayed at the fall- 
ing of the day. The same chapter also tells us that 
Isaac went forth into the field to meditate at even- 
tide. A sense of the unknown shows to us our faith 
and throws us back upon the arms of God. Faith 
that continues unconscious in the daylight becomes 
real and conscious at night as we "pray the 
Lord our soul to keep. If I should die before I 
wake I pray thee, Lord, my soul to take." When 
we part with our friends for a season we say " good- 
by," and perhaps think into the words all the mean- 
ing they properly contain, " God be with you." And 
when we bid our friends a long farewell — how our 
hearts reach up unto God, and with what earnest 
looking unto him we follow them as they move 
through the swinging gate and go to be with them 
that have gone on before and waiting to bid welcome 
to us when we shall follow. 

May we who rest so cozily in the comforts and 
amenities of life and who lean down so heavily upon 
the enriching friendships of the good and the strong 
and the beloved, discover, when disappointments 



UNCONSCIOUS FAITH. 97 

strike and bereavements overtake, that our leaning, 
even more than we suspected, was after all upon the 
arm of the Lord. As the light becomes paler and paler 
in the west may the stars glow with a steadier and 
cheerier splendor. And when we come at last to the 
night-fall of life, like Eliezer out amid the evening 
lights of Mesopotamia, may our thoughts bend nat- 
urally into prayer, our faith assert itself in the gloam- 
ing, and there be the revealings to us of the divine 
arm mighty to save, the divine hand gentle to 
shelter and to guide. 



VII 



T Being in the Way, the Lord Led Me. — Genesis 

xxiv:27. 

LIEZER had been sent to find a wife for Isaac. 
His mission proving successful, he bowed his 
head and worshipped the Lord saying : " Blessed be 
the Lord God of my master Abraham, who hath not 
left destitute my master of his mercy and his truth ; 
I being in the way, the Lord led me/' 

In a previous discussion of this same text it be- 
came fairly evident that there exists considerable 
more faith in God's daily governing control over us 
than men themselves are regularly conscious of. The 
confidence we have in a divine supervision may not 
mount up to the point of a defined thought in the 
mind, but may for all that have great power to quiet 
and steady us. Our concern, then, was more with the 
divine side of the matter. The peculiarity of our 
text is that it gives us a glimpse of both sides : I be- 
ing in the way the Lord led me — the human and di- 
vine both. What interests us this morning is the 
human factor in the case ; not God's guidance per se; 

(98) 



DOING, THE MEANS OF KNOWING. 99 

but where we have to be, and what we have to do in 
order to secure it. 

I am sure we shall get along best here by not try- 
ing to be profound. It is one of the striking features 
of this narrative of Eliezer that it runs so close to 
theological sand-bars without becoming grounded on 
them. Scholarliness has its prerogatives; acumen, 
even in matters of religion, is not without its advan- 
tages : still a thinker may be so curious, and a theo- 
logian so deep-searching, that like a freighted vessel 
drawing a good deal of water, he may be dragged into 
the shallows by the very load he carries. 

It is not our intent to say that Eliezer was super- 
ficial. He only illustrates the ease with which an 
earnest and practical mind can get along with diffi- 
culties that might prove very troublesome to one 
who had less business on his hands, and more leisure 
for speculation ; very much as a man with a matter 
on his mind, needing to be at once attended to, with 
confidence and safety would cross a narrow foot- 
bridge that might prove the death of some other who 
had time to calculate the dizzy height at which it 
was swung. Men are every day falling off because 
they have time to be impracticable and leisure to get 
dizzy. Much is to be said in behalf of work as an 
antidote to doctrinal irresolution and theological de- 
bility. Eliezer was at w T ork, a live, earnest man of 
affairs. The doctrine that God's action and man's 
action supplement each other gave therefore pleasant 



100 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

support to his feeling, without offering provocation 
to his thinking. He felt the fact without the time 
or temper to think the manner of the fact. And in- 
deed at the impulse of feeling, this slave out of Da- 
mascus has put the difficult truth in a manner of 
dignified simplicity, which a mind more scholarly 
and refined than his might well afford to envy: "I 
being in the way, the Lord led me." An illustration of 
what occurs so often, that divine truth best touches 
the life at the easy level of natural thinking. True 
sight is without effort. The soul's need and God's 
supply are at grade. Hard thinking wrings the truth 
of its juice. Even the lightning is retarded by its 
own velocity. The prism shows the strands of the 
sunbeam, but spoils it as light. "I being in the way, 
the Lord led me." 

Everything that took place on that expedition of 
Eliezer's came to pass in a most simple and natural 
way, and yet at the end of it all he said, "The Lord 
led me." He took, we presume, the traveled route, 
and so far as we can gather traversed it in the ordi- 
nary way, heard no voices, dreamed no dreams, saw 
no lights; and yet, "the Lord led me." He arrived 
at the city of Nahor at evening time, and stopped 
outside the city at a spring ; which does not need to 
be accounted for ; his camels were thirsty. At that 
hour the women came out from the city to draw wa- 
ter; which it was usual for them to do at that hour, 
the narrative remarks quietly. And yet "the Lord 



DOING, THE MEANS OF KNOWING. 101 

led me" said Eliezer. It is nothing to excite remark 
that among the young women that came out to draw 
water was one of Isaac's cousins. It is likely that 
there were other such there beside Rebecca. This 
was the homestead, that was w T hy Eliezer went to 
Haran. That Rebecca should have given him to 
drink and drawn also for his camels, reflects not only 
her own kindliness but the general hospitality of the 
Orient. That she should have been a damsel of sur- 
passing beauty and therefore suitable in this respect 
for Isaac is as easily explained as the rest. Eliezer 
was evidently waiting for just such a young woman 
to appear before he asked the favor of a drink. That 
is clearly contained in the story. He did not ask the 
Lord to designate the woman, but selected her him- 
self according to his own best taste and judgment, 
and prayed that the one he was going to select in 
that way might be the one of whom the Lord had 
already himself made choice. And having loaded 
her with gifts, and having discovered that she was of 
the kindred of his master, there by the side of the 
well he bowed his head, worshipped God and said, "I 
being in the way, the Lord led me." 

Everything then came along quietly ; nothing ir- 
regular that would suggest interposition, nothing like 
a break between successive incidents that would 
shgw or seem to show God working across from the 
one to the other. So long as the electric wire is 
without break the electric current is continuous, and 



102 THREE GATES ON A SIDE, 

makes of itself no show nor sound. But with a fault 
in the wire the current leaps the interval with a 
flash. In the line of this story there is no break 
which gives opportunity for a flash in the transit: 
nothing scintillant : each step the natural preface to 
the one after, the natural sequel to the one before: 
everything natural — if we know what that is — every- 
thing as Eliezer was accustomed to see it : and still 
"the Lord led me." 

Eliezer did not pauperize the ordinary method of 
event for the purpose of endowing his theory of 
Providence. He did not put nature out of joint in 
order to give the race to supernature. The farther 
we get along in the world, the less men are going to 
have to say about special Providences and divine in- 
terpositions. God is on the side of method. It is 
to the credit of Eliezer that when events proceeded 
so methodically he recognized God's agency so dis- 
tinctly. We have made great gain in our doctrine of 
Providence, when we have learned to feel that there 
is just as much room for God to work inside of steady 
and ordinary events as inside of startling and spas- 
modic ones. 

This sets us in a pleasanter and more unconstrained 
relation with Providence, and makes it rather the 
ground for us confidently to walk on, than the sky for 
us to look timidly up to. It lets us read with a stronger 
accent the commonplace events of every day. It 
puts new meaning into the current of history and the 



DOING, THE MEANS OF KNOWING. 103 

daily drift of life. It lets divineness into small mat- 
ters. We come to recognize heavenly purpose and 
guidance, even if to-day is easily explicable by yes- 
terday, and to-morrow the legitimate child of to-day. 
The miraculous and the non-miraculous soften their 
mutual asperities. God works at our level, and with 
such intimacy of action that it is not quite easy al- 
ways to tell what is his and what ours. 

If Eliezar was inspired to do what he did, he had 
at any rate no feeling of being inspired. Probably 
that is the case with most inspiration. Eliezer pro- 
ceeded to do as he thought best : but what he 
thought best to do himself was somehow what God 
had already thought best to have him do. Con- 
sciously exercising his own judgment he was at the 
same time unconsciously exercising God's judg- 
ment. Being honest and unselfish, and anxious to do 
right, his judgment, as was natural, became the small 
fac-simile of God's judgment; just as a small mag- 
netic needle will point in the same direction as a large 
one. And that, I take it, is nine-tenths of inspiration 
and ninety per cent, of divine Providence. 

Providence in the sense in which it was exercised 
over Eliezer is not a matter of visions nor of voices, 
nor is it a matter of God's forming our judgments for 
us, nor of holding our wills perforce at an angle 
with our own proper volition. Rather is it a mat- 
ter of his having his own will and so arranging that 
we shall be able to find out what that will is, and 



104 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

therefore be in a situation to do it. That is Provi- 
dence ; that is divine Government. The good man 
will be the one to discover what God's will is most 
easily, and the one to do that will most, promptly. 
Hence it is that David says: "The steps of a good 
man are ordered of the Lord." 

In our case, therefore, as in that of Eliezer, mani- 
festly, there is nothing in God's provident supervis- 
ion of us that trenches upon our proper personality. 
Our faculties are left unabridged. Will has free 
scope for exercise. Discernment, sense, sagacity, 
have left to them all their natural play-room. We 
are led of the Lord, but not as a horse is led — by the 
bits. In cases where right is doubtful and expedi- 
ency is uncertain, if we are honest we shall not be 
allowed of God permanently to go astray or to mis- 
take. We shall gravitate toward what is right and 
best, but we shall gravitate in the use of the best 
powers of reasoning or the best sources of informa- 
tion we know how to avail ourselves of. In our per- 
plexities as to what we best do and where we best 
go, a wise human counselor is the modern equiva 
lent of an old covenant angel. The Bible, the con 
science, good sense, intelligent friends, surrounding 
circumstances, native bents and predispositions, these 
are all of them appliances to be industriously worked 
for knowing God's mind. The only safe way is the 
Lord's way. The only safe plan for ourselves is the 
Lord's plan for us. If we seek it we shall find it ; and 



DOING, THE MEANS OP KNOWING. 105 

if we find it and walk in it there will be fulfilled in 
us the words of Eliezer : "I being in the way, the 
Lord led me." 

Providence is not an affair of startling events, vis- 
ions traced out in the air, finger-boards supernatu- 
rally set up along the way we are to travel. Pillars 
of fire such as were seen in the wilderness are acci- 
dents of heavenly guidance, not its substance. We 
can hardly be interested in those old flashing demon- 
strations of guidance, if we suppose them to be any- 
thing more than crude and sensuous symbols of a 
fact as true and real to-day as then. The pillar of 
fire in the desert was an accommodation to feeble 
times and a childish age, and was only like the title 
placed under a painting, written there to show the 
uninstructed what the instructed know without any 
showing : "God in History" for beginners, like ideas 
put in the form of pictures for the sake of children 
that cannot read. 

This way of looking at the matter is justified by 
our narrative, and is staying and wholesome ; staying, 
because it gives us a higher power and wisdom than 
ourselves to trust in ; and wholesome because it at 
the same time makes human intelligence mean more, 
and man's efforts count for more. The best doctrine 
of "faith and works" is that in which each of the two 
does the most to stimulate the other. There will be 
the best working where a man has prayed as though 
he thought everything depended on God. There 



106 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

will be the best praying where a man has worked as 
though he thought everything depended on himself. 
Careful preparation for the journey, and the exercise 
of his best judgment did not hinder Eliezer from 
crediting God with the results ; and his confidence 
that God would bring him to happy results only made 
him more attentive to the loading of the camels and 
the providing of the earrings and the bracelets. Such 
a view of Providence leaves us feeling that the more 
God does the more opportunity there is for man to 
do ; and the more man does the more opportunity is 
left for God to do. 

Proper confidence in a divine wisdom will then 
stimulate us to seek after it ; and proper confidence 
in divine power will stir us up to stand and work in 
the drift of it. The child only walks the more in- 
dustriously because the father in whose hand his own 
is held really does so much of the walking for him. 
When you build along a perpendicular it gives you 
courage, for you know that then the whole gravity 
of the globe stands pledged to make your building 
stanch. It is related that Alexander was only made 
more earnest when told by the priest at Jerusalem 
that he was the fulfillment of Daniel's prophecy. 
Sailors only crowd on more sail when the vessel is 
moving with the wind. And it was to stimulate the 
Philippians that Paul wrote to them, "Work, for it 
is God that worketh in you." 

This incident from Genesis throws a flood of light 



DOING, THE MEANS OF KNOWING. 107 



upon the case of any man who is in any kind of 
earthly perplexity: "I being in the way, the Lord 
led me." The unsettled questions of life form large 
part of our most wearing experiences; and such 
questions are continually arising. There is no jour- 
ney that has so many forks in the road as the jour- 
ney of life. Now there were a great many turns 
which Eliezer might have taken between Hebron 
and Haran, between lading the camels and obtaining 
Rebecca's promise to go back with him, any one of 
which would have involved failure. He had a very 
definite idea of what he was to get, but a very indefi- 
nite idea as to whom he was to get and how he was 
to get her. But there was one step in the expedi- 
tion that was distinct — that he had no question 
about, namely, that he was to harness — gird his cam- 
els — and take the road East. "I being in the way, the 
Lord led me." He saw one step ahead which is all 
any man ever needs. It is a very dark night when 
there are not at least three feet between the point 
where you stand and the nearest stumbling-stone 
that will endanger you. You do not know the way 
to Hartford, but you know the way to the cars, and 
they will take you there. It has always been my 
experience that if I did not know what I was to do 
second, it was unmistakably clear what I ought to do 
first. It will always be in point to gird the camels. 

Ninety-nine per cent, of our perplexities are about 
matters that we have not yet quite gotten to. There 



108 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

is a game which children play of setting up a row of 
blocks at a little interval from each other and then 
toppling over the first against the second, which falls 
and knocks down the third, and so down the whole 
line. I expect the problems, the practical problems 
of our life, are arranged in a good deal the same way ; 
that there is a certain order in which our difficulties 
need to be taken, and that the easy knocking over of 
the one nearest will itself go a long way at any rate 
toward leveling the next and all that stand forward 
of it. The guns of each fortress taken we shall find 
bear on the outworks of the next. There is divine 
economy in not having to-morrow come until after 
to-day; just as to-day is easier for having had yester- 
day. " I being in the way, the Lord led me." The 
act of getting ready to start probably settled for him 
some matters that came after the start, and so on 
till he reached Mesopotamia. Questions settle them- 
selves when we are on the road, as the lantern we 
carry in the night lengthens its light forward with 
each onward step. The most crooked river will let 
us out to the sea if the boat is pushed into the 
channel. 

Our greatest weariness comes from bearing bur- 
dens that have not yet been really laid on us. Half 
is done when we have concluded to take matters up 
one at a time, in the order in which they have been 
laid down for us. The first thing is always 
plain and easy; and, if you will think of it, it is 



DOING, THE MEANS OF KNOWING. 109 



never anything but the first thing that we have 
to do. 

The matter of limiting our anxiety to what comes 
next, we might apply to the matter of doctrine. 

The world is full just now of doctrinal perplexi- 
ties. Laymen ponder perplexities and ministers 
preach perplexities ; and yet nine-tenths of the mat- 
ters that are under agitation are no more relevant to 
our immediate needs, with work to do, characters to 
form, and souls to save, than a knowledge of trigo- 
nometry is to an accountant. It really takes very lit- 
tle doctrine to meet our requirements as every day 
Christians. If we utilized all the truths we are cer- 
tain of we should be in much better position to 
decide upon others that we are in doubt about. It 
is working at cross-purposes with Providence to put 
into a problem the thought which belongs to a duty 
lying between us and the problem. To know things 
which it is not practically relevant to our characters 
to know, is an affair of scholarship not of religion nor 
of ethics. If you do not know what to believe, do 
the duty which comes next and you will gain by it 
as much knowledge as you need for the discovery of 
the next duty. Behavior is basal to knowledge; "If 
any man will do y he shall know," said the Lord. 

The principle of our text has also its relation to 
men who would like to be of some use to the world, 
to the suffering and the distressed, and do not know 
exactly how. The difficulty here, too, most likely 



110 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

lies in trying to solve remote problems and carry 
large and distant burdens, instead of lending a hand 
to the first concrete case of distress that offers. 
There is no difficulty in getting into beneficent work 
if we will take opportunities by the handle. To 
chafe our hearts against the monstrous problems of 
sin and suffering in this city, for example, goes not 
nearly so far as taking personal hold of an actual case 
of distress and relieving it. Problems are most eas. 
ily solved in the field. Things alter their appearance 
as we get in among them ; lines grow in distinctness 
as we come nearer them. Act trains thought. The 
mind determines the hand, but the hand also makes 
revelations to the mind. There are too many phi- 
lanthropic people standing around on the outer edge 
of human distress. Doing is a means of knowing. 
Action is the stone on which faculties get whetted 
for discernment and accomplishment. We have not 
to carry burdens in the mass. The world began to 
grow happier and better by the ministry of a man 
who helped people just as and where he chanced to 
meet them. The highway opens out in front of 
every man's door. It is always safe to gird the cam- 
els and get onto the road : " I being in the way, the 
Lord led me," The longer you act like Eliezer the 
more wisdom you will find in his unconscious theol- 
ogy. Trust yourself for the first thing and the Lord 
for the thing after. 

And then, in a single closing word, let me apply 



DOING, THE MEANS OF KNOWING. Ill 

this to the case of men who hesitate to begin a Chris- 
tian life for fear they will not hold out. There is a 
great deal that is hidden away in a Christian life be- 
fore we are through with it, but as with everything 
else, its beginning stands out in the clear. As with 
Eliezer the first step is in the light. Everything de- 
pends on taking things up in their order. If you are 
a pedestrian you know what a difference there is in 
the spirit with which different men walk. One man 
will start out on a tramp of thirty miles with a pleas- 
ant aad vivacious swing that you would think he 
was only going to the top of the next hill. Well, 
that is all he is going to do now ; and when that is 
finished he will be in admirable trim to take the next 
stretch. The next man will start tired, and stoop 
with the load of the coming thirty miles already on 
him, aching with what he- is going to do. 

It is the like of that that is deterring some of 
these people from beginning the Christian walk. I 
am told that every little while. Eliezer would never 
have started if he had determined to wait around 
Hebron till he had gotten all the details of the en- 
terprise worked out before he started. He learned 
on the road. The boy's shoulders grow broader be- 
fore it is time for them to carry man's burdens. 
You have no business now with to-morrow's obliga- 
tions. You certainly will not hold out unless you 
begin. Eliezer began by doing the first thing and 
trusting God for the second. Faith and works from 



112 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

the start. Perseverance of the saints is not your 
matter, not yet. Disembarking pertains to the end 
of the voyage. Being a Christian is a matter of 
doing the first thing that needs to be done, trusting 
to God to make clear to us the thing which comes 
next. Perseverance of the saints is merely continu- 
ing to do that. Christianity is always a matter of 
u Now" It begins with "now" and is "now" all 
the way through. And it is the now that is just here 
that is all you have anything to do with ; and it will 
always be so. "I being in the way, the Lord led me." 
You will not get to Haran to-day, but you can get 
on the road. You can set your face Godwards and 
Christwards: you can leave off waiting and start, 
and take a step to-day, and then you will be in readi- 
ness to take the next step to-morrow. You are go- 
ing to begin sometime : you expect to begin some- 
time. The present moment is yours. I trust that 
we shall find as we meet together in our after meet- 
ing' that some here have seized this moment, that a 
beginning is going to be made with some of you and 
camels harnessed and the Lord have opportunity 
given him to show that now, as in Mesopotamia, 
he takes care of them that commit themselves to 
him, and proves himself a trusty leader and suffi- 
cient helper to all them that do his will and put 
themselves in the path of his appointment. 



VIII 



I K 7101V Whom I Have Believed. — // Timo- 
thy i:12. 

"Tl^HOM " Paul says. Quite another thing from 
W "what." " I know what I have believed ;" 
that is good. " I know whom I have believed ; that 
is better — best. Such believing has easily its ad- 
vantages, several of them. When the thing we be- 
lieve is a person, our believing, creed, becomes sim- 
ple and coherent ; the lines of our thinking all gather 
at a point, our creed is made one, like grapes grow- 
ing in one cluster from one stem. There is no dan- 
ger of forgetting it ; no need of writing it down and 
committing it. It is always there. It is no sum of 
particulars ; it is not the footing of a long column of 
details that have no relation to each other or regard 
for each other. 

I am interested on occasion to ask Christian peo- 
ple what their Christian belief is. It is instructive 
to note the wide divergence of answer. One believes 
one thing, another, another thing. " I know whom 
I have believed. " To be a Christian is to believe in 

(113) 



114 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

Christ. And what is it to believe in Christ? We 
reach too high for our answers ; necessary truth 
grows on low branches. The boy says — I believe in 
my father. All is told that needs to be told. It is 
simple, complete. The boy does not write it down. 
" I believe in my father." Creed that converges in a 
person can get along without pencil and paper. Sen- 
tences and chapters and annotations are an after- 
thought. 

Another thing about this creed with a person in it 
is, that it gives something for all our faculties to do. 
" I know what I believe ; " such a creed is only intel- 
lectual ; it is an affair of thinking, reasoning, infer- 
ence. Church creeds are made by the scholars of the 
church. Mind does it. It is matter of analysis and 
definition. An eminent jurist put his law-students 
into theology for mental training. The reduction to 
thought and formula of the great truths of religion 
is grandly disciplinary, but disciplinary to intellect. 
Choate's students were still nothing but students. 
Theology only taught them to think better. 

Theological thought and discussion works so far 
only on the same lines as scientific. Mind only 
works ; no heart, nothing volitional. A creed that 
gathers directly about person yields keen thinking, 
but yields much beside. It starts feeling, sets the af- 
fections in play, draws out the will and puts it to work. 
We each of us have one or more men that we be- 
lieve in, with all our mind, heart and strength — men 



/ KNOW WHOM I HAVE BELIEVED. 115 

that are so far forth our creed ; and they stir and 
stimulate us in every way, clearing our ideas, to be 
sure, but firing our hearts and making our resolutions 
sinewy and nervy. Christ made Paul a man of pro- 
found thinking, but a man of fervid passion and 
giant purpose — gave every faculty in him something 
to do. He was great all over. 

A third and consequent advantage in a personal 
creed is that it is the only kind that can produce ef- 
fects, and work within us substantial alteration. The 
average creed is rather a symptom of w T hat the 
holder of it is now, than a force competent to make 
him other, wiser or better than he is now ; it only de- 
notes how far we have gone in our thinking, and the 
mental attitude in which we just now happen to be 
standing. We are more likely to alter our creed 
than we are to have our creed alter us. Creed is 
flower, not stalk. The man supports his creed more 
than his creed him. 

I am not criticising creeds. It is an excellent 
thing to know what we believe, and to be able with 
conciseness and effect to state it. And it is pleasant 
to have two men, or two hundred men, think so 
nearly alike that they can prepare a creed that they 
all agree to consent to. But it is they that prepare 
the creed ; they make the creed, and not the creed 
them ; it is the statement of what they happen just 
now to be in their doctrinal apprehensions. It does 
not differ from them (if it is really their creed), is no 



116 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

wiser than they, and no stronger. It will neither lift 
nor depress. It is only the water-line marking the 
height at which the current is just now flowing ; and 
water-line will neither shallow a river nor deepen it. 
Paul does not say I know what I believe, but I 
know whom I believe, which goes wider and higher. 
Such a creed is not one that Paul holds, but one that 
holds Paul, and can do something with him there- 
fore. " Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou 
shalt be saved ;" and this reaches a great way farther 
than holding a particular set of opinions in regard to 
the second member of the Trinity. Such orthodoxy 
is mere play. It makes far less difference what 
studied opinions a man holds in regard to Christ, 
than that he believes in Christ in the same unstudied 
and unreasoned way that every true son believes in 
his true father. It is of less account whether you 
suppose the sun is eight feet across or eight hundred 
thousand miles across, than it is that you stand out 
in a warm bright place and get the benefit of the 
sun. The sick man walking abroad says, " I like to 
get out doors ; I believe in sunshine." Perhaps he 
has been to school and understands how three strands 
weave themselves together inside every integral sun- 
beam, and perhaps not. No quantity of correct idea 
about the sun can take the place of standing and 
living where the sun shines ; and standing and liv- 
ing where the sun shines will save from fatal re- 
sults a vast amount of incorrect ideas about the sun. 



/ KNOW WHOM I HA VE BELIEVED. 117 

Belief in person works back upon me as an energy, 
alters me, builds me up or tears me down — at any rate 
never leaves me alone ; it works as gravity does among 
the stars ; keeps everything on the move. Such be- 
lief is not mental attitude, but moral appropriation ; 
it is the bee clinging to the clover-blossom and suck- 
ing out the sweet. It is regulative and constructive. 

We are determined by the person we believe in. 
Belief makes him my possession. Belief breaks down 
his walls and widens him out till he contains me. 
His thoughts reappear as my thoughts ; his ways, 
manners, feelings, hopes, impulses, motives, become 
mine. I know whom I have believed. We make 
our ordinary creeds, and revise and amend and repeal 
them. Personal creeds make us, and revise, amend 
and repeal us. No picture of a friend can be accu- 
rate enough to begin to take the friend's place or do 
the friend's work. No idea of a person can ever be 
enough like the person to serve as substitute. Know- 
ing what God is to perfection would never become 
the equivalent of knowing God. As Christians, we 
work religious ideas and opinions for a good deal 
more than they are worth. One of the best results 
keen thinking can reach is, to show us how little 
headway we can make on rough ground and in dark 
places if we've not something beside keen thinking 
to depend on. 

If we bring this to the level of common life, its 
workings are simple and manifest. It is in the home. 



118 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

The mother is the child's first creed. He believes in 
her before he believes what she says, and it is by his 
belief in her that he grows and ripens. If we cannot 
tell it all out in words what this believing in a 
mother or father means, we feel the meaning of it, 
and the deep sense is worth more than the wordy 
paragraph, any time. The little boy puts his hand in 
his father's, and insensibly becomes like his father. 
The miracle of Elisha and the Shunammite's son is 
done over again in the case of every child. It is the 
gist of all schooling. 

Education is an affair of person — person meeting 
person. Pupils do not become wise by being told 
things. Wisdom is not the accumulation of specific 
cognitions. It is men that educate. Person is the 
true schoolmaster. Of all the teachers that have 
had to do with my schooling aside from my own 
parents, there are only two that I would not be per- 
fectly reconciled to the idea of utterly and forever 
forgetting. Even an encyclopaedia does not become 
an educator by being dressed in gentlemen's clothes. 
What best helps a boy to become a man is to have 
somebody to look up to ; which is like our text — " I 
know whom I have believed." Every teacher needs 
to be able to say of himself, in a limited sense at 
least, what Christ the arch-teacher said of himself, 
" I am the truth." 

And out on the broader fields of social and national 
life we encounter the same principle over again. 



/ KNO W WHOM I HA VE BELIE VED. 119 

T\\e present wealth of a people depends largely upon 
its commerce and productive industries. The stabil- 
ity of a people and its promise for the future, de- 
pends quite as much upon the quality of the men 
upon whom the masses allow their regards to fix and 
their loyalty to fasten. Every great man in our his- 
tory, recognized by the people as great, is so much 
foundation for the support of an honorable and dig- 
nified generation to come ; while every second and 
third rate man that is by any means foisted into an ad- 
miring and notable conspicuity is so much done toward 
dragging the masses down into hopeless mediocrity, 
and debasing them to a helpless moral inanity. 
Dirty gods and goddesses made dirty Greeks. Old 
principles still hold. The wicked walk on every side 
when the vilest men are exalted. We are determined 
by the men we believe in. Only person is power. 
Christian faith not only appropriates the teaching, 
but the Teacher ; not only the promises, but the 
great Promiser. 

" I know whom I have believed. " And believing 
in Christ in this way to begin with, issued in Paul's 
believing a host of particular facts in regard to 
Christ, and Paul's theology is his blossomed piety. 
No amount of faith in Christ's words will add up 
into faith in him. You must have noticed how full 
all Christ's teachings are of the personal pronoun 
" I." Paul's Christianity began on the road to 
Damascus. Christ came to him not as a conclusion, 



120 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

but as a premise ; and on his knees he said, " Lord,'* 
and what he afterward came to know about Christ 
was what he found in Christ. " Christ is made unto 
us wisdom." He found and taught the truth, but it 
was the truth as it was in Christ. His theology, 
when it came, was the outward budding of just this 
initial loyalty to Jesus which gave Jesus the oppor- 
tunity to form himself in Paul and so to inform Paul. 
The only man that can truly inform me is the man 
that conform himself in me; that is what informa- 
tion means — immensely personal again, you see, as 
everything of much account is. 

And it is so everywhere. Religious matters, in 
this respect, step in the same ranks with other mat- 
ters. The grandest convictions that we receive from 
other people are not constructed in us by their logic, 
but created in us by their personal inspiration. 
Logic does not count much. A small and quiet kind 
of baptism is all the time going on between a great 
man and a small man, so that we can speak with 
tongues that we are not aware of having learned. 
Men are not persuaded to be Christians, nor argued 
into an acceptation of fundamental truths. There 
is a man that doesn't believe in Christianity, but he 
believes in his Christian mother, and he does not 
think carefully enough to discover that part of that 
faith is faith in his mother and part of it faith in the 
religion that has made her the strong, sweet and 
saintly creature she is. 



/ KNO W WHOM I HA VE BELIE VED. 121 

The gospel is not the divine book, but the Divine 
Man, and a great many miniature copies of that gos- 
pel are around us, working still effects along personal 
lines. 

We make Christianity hard by crumbling it up 
into impersonal propositions. It is no part of our 
genius to like a truth apart from its flesh and blood 
incarnation in some live man. It is a hard and awk- 
ward thing for me to believe in the doctrine of the 
immortality of the soul for instance. I do not like 
the doctrine ; my intellect abhors it. No logic could 
persuade me of its truth, and I should never think of 
trying to syllogize anybody else into a possession of 
it. But my father is immortal and I know it. Your 
mother is immortal and you cannot start in your 
mind a suspicion to the contrary. Your mother — I 
speak it reverently — has to you " brought life and im- 
mortality to light. " Let us be done with bare doctrinal 
nakednesses that are forms of truth without the sub 
stance, and that anger the soul and madden the intel- 
lect. It is no matter of wickedness that you cannot 
with your whole heart take hold of the doctrine ; a doc- 
trine has in it no heart to challenge your heartiness. 
Believe in your immortal mother or in your immor- 
tal wife, and remand the unfleshed dogma of immor- 
tality to the limbo of forgetfulness where it belongs. 

One or two things more, and I will stop. From 
all this we gather that a man who gets called an unbe- 
liever, and even calls himself such, may believe a great 



122 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

deal more than he suspects. Unconscious orthodoxy 
is a factor of the times that needs to be taken into earn- 
est account. There are quantities of unutilized and un- 
suspected faith. Some of it comes into the meeting- 
house and a good deal of it stays out. How can the 
faith in the church get into intelligent and sympa- 
thetic relation with the faith that is outside ? It is a 
reflection to solemnize us that no man is either too 
wise or too wicked to become a disciple and an 
apostle, if only he were rightly met and dealt with. 
Even Judas hung himself because he had wronged 
the Lord. If you are a half-believer or no believer 
at all, do not, I pray of you, estimate your unbelief 
by the difficulty you find in accepting specific doc- 
trinal statements. You do not believe in immortal- 
ity. Did you ever see anybody that you had some 
little idea had about him something or other that 
death could not touch ? Let alone the abstract and 
come close to the concrete and personal, and let it 
work. You reject the doctrine of a change of heart ; 
and it is a doctrine repugnant to our natures and a 
conundrum to our intelligence. Did you ever see 
anybody who stopped being what he had been and 
commenced being what he had not been ? If 
you find it hard work to square your opinions 
with the catechism, see whether you do not draw 
into a little closer coincidence with men and wo- 
men whose lives transparently embody the Gospel, 
and then draw your inference. The Gospel is 



/ KNO W WHOM I HA VE BELIE VED. 123 

not a book, nor a catechism, nor a formula, but 
a life. 

To another class of uncertain hearers I want to 
add, Do not try to get your religious ideas all ar- 
ranged and your doctrinal notions balanced. There 
is a great deal of that kind that is best taken care of 
when it is left to take care of itself. There is no ad- 
vantage in borrowing some one's else opinion and no 
use in hurrying your own opinion. Saul had no 
creed, but he humbled himself before the Lord, be- 
came Paul and wrote more theology than has been 
digested in eighteen centuries. Begin with what is 
personal, as he did : " I know w/iom I have believed." 
Try to know the Lord. Draw nigh to God and he 
will draw nigh to you. " The fear of the Lord is the 
beginning of knowledge." " Blessed are the poor in 
heart for they shall see God," which means that con- 
science makes insight. "If any man will do his will 
he shall know." Christ gives us in knowledge as 
much as we give him in obedience. " Seek first the 
kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these 
things shall be added." It is the orthodox heart 
that makes the orthodox creed. There is no other 
way of beginning to be a Christian but the old way — 
" Come unto vie!' 

And you and I, fellow Christians, owe it to these 
unsettled people among us and about us to help 
them to strong anchorage upon Christ ; and our 
qualifications for the work will be our own thorough 



124 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

rest in and establishment upon Christ and an ineffable 
commixture of love and tact, and tact considered not 
as a natural talent, but as a heavenly grace. And, 
first of all, we have got ir. soften down all our asper- 
ity toward those who do not think as we do, and 
who do not come at things in exactly our way. 
There is a good deal of faith in the church, and a 
good deal out of it ; but there is no amicable relation 
between the two. In the old days we are told that 
the church had favor with all the people, which is 
not so now. 

It appears to me that there are certain things that 
are going to be managed differently sometime from 
what they are now. I don't know, but I guess so. 
We must needs remember that no error is entirely 
erroneous. We shall be safer, as well as more 
Pauline, if we assume that a good deal of un- 
belief is only ignorant belief. We will do better not 
to forestall the judgment day, and not to do picket 
duty on the frontiers of Christ's kingdom, when what 
we are appointed to do is to herald that the kingdom 
is here, and to publish the invitation of the Lord— 
" Look unto me and be ye saved, all ye ends of the 
earth. " 

It is very far from my mind that we ought to 
make the church a meaningless thing, and its privi- 
leges only a nominal matter. At the same time I re- 
member that Philip baptized the eunuch on the spot, 
and no questions asked (according to the New Re- 



/ KNOW WHOM 1 HAVE BELIEVED. 125 

vision), and that the poor thief on the cross, whom 
we should quite likely have been disposed to probate 
for a half-year, Christ took with him into Paradise 
the same evening. 

In our relations to these people, there is another 
thing for us to remember of a more positive charac- 
ter, which is, as we have seen, that there is nothing 
that tells upon men and their convictions like life. 
Men believe in the personal. Truth pure and sim- 
ple goes but a little way, except as it is lived. Ab- 
stractions are not current outside of the schools. 
The best preaching of a change of heart is a heart 
that is changed. These people are not going to be 
touched by anything that has not breath and a pulse. 
Living is the best teaching. One honest act done 
when dishonesty would have taken a premium of 
fifty per cent, will go farther with the man at your 
elbow than ten sermons on stealing from this or any 
pulpit. Nothing is quite real till it is personal. 
In practical esteem, one moral hero, belted and 
plumed, outweighs the decalogue ; which is to say 
that one virtue acted is worth ten on paper. So that 
if you and I are going to help these people to be 
conscious and pronounced Christians, we are not go- 
ing to accomplish it by merely telling them about 
Christ and compounding before them feeble dilu- 
tions of divine biography, but by being ourselves so 
personally charged with the personal Spirit of God 
in Christ that in our words they shall hear him, in 



126 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

our love they shall feel him, in our behavior they 
shall be witnesses of him, and in this way he become 
to them Way, Truth and Life, all-invigorating power, 
all-comprehensive creed. 




iX 

** r* ** ** 

The Lord Is My Shepherd. — Psalm xxiii:l. 

E are saved the tedium and the necessity of 
exposition. The heart here is a more learned 
commentator than the head. Essentials are easy, lie 
close by, and do not require to be won by strenuous 
thinking. Bustling, intellectual strivings with the 
deep, blessed things of God, hinder our appreciative 
view of them, as the deep places in the river are vis- 
ible only through still water ; as the grasses load 
themselves heavily with dew only on quiet nights, 
and as it is the tremulousness in the air that prevents 
astronomers from gaining a clear hold upon distant 
lights. 

"The Lord is my Shepherd." The sweet reality, 
then, of this Shepherd-Psalm taxes us no more than 
the survey of a picture would do, or the hearing of a 
melody, and that not because it deals with the mat- 
ter carelessly or lightly, for the picture also will often 
carry us farther than the paragraph, and the melody 
takes us to places we could not have reached with the 
symphony. The Psalm does not provoke ourthink- 

(127) 



128 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

ing ; touches us away down below our philosophy 
and our theology ; comes to us rather like a covert 
from the heat, a refuge from weariness, a shelter 
from the rain, and folds as unthinkingly into the 
creases of our souls as water adapts itself to the 
thirsty. Hunger is the best explanation of bread, 
and the rain soaks easily into the dry sand. 

The longings of the human spirit have their own 
particular beatitude, and better than any other in- 
terpreters make clear the meaning of the Holy 
Word. That Word shows itself to be God's Book, 
by showing itself to be, first of all, man's book ; and 
around this particular oasis of truth, the 23d Psalm, 
tired, hungry, erring, and anxious men and women 
of many nations and generations, have gathered and 
found green pasturage, still waters, recovery from 
their wanderings, and gentle light to guide them 
through the valley of death-shadow. And so long 
as thirsty men drink water, and drink it too, not- 
withstanding the seemingly incongruous elements 
which science shows water to be composed of, so 
long spirits that are thirsty, and worn, and dis- 
quieted, will gather upon this and similar pasturage 
ground of heavenly comfort and supply, and find in 
their own deep replenishment, reasons that reason 
knows nothing about. 

And this Psalm brings us near to God and our 
own souls not only, but near to one another. It is 
a great, roomy, catholic Psalm. All the great and 



THE LORD IS MT SHEPHERD. 129 

blessed things of the Bible are so wide that we can 
stand on them, all of us, without any jostling, or 
crowding, or inconveniencing. We fall easily into 
different ways of thinking ; into different schools of 
theology ; into different denominations of religious 
faith. But after all I do not believe that these 
marks of discrimination are cut very deep. Children 
playing on the beach draw long conspicuous lines in 
the sand, and they wear an aspect, those lines do, of 
depth and permanence ; but w r hen once the tide has 
moved up over them, and played with the ridges and 
the furrows, and retreats back to the sea once more, 
it leaves the beach all white, and leveled, and con- 
tinuous again. We make, some of us, a good deal of 
ado about the special fashion of our own creed and 
cultus, but these marks do not groove down into the 
substance of the matter, and no one supposes that 
they do. 

The things with which first of all the Gospel has 
to deal, and which it has to supply, are the great 
deep, common wants of all human souls; and into a 
want the denominational idea does not enter. Old 
School Presbyterians and New School Presbyterians 
feel in just the same way when they are tired. Con- 
gregational thirst and Methodist thirst denote the 
same thing, and require the same water for its 
quenching. And so of the spiritual thirsts. "As 
the heart panteth after the water-brooks, so panteth 
my soul after Thee, O God," which voiced the 



130 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

prayer of a Jew, and voices our prayer just as well. 
Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, we can all of us 
stand up in front of this 23rd Psalm, and feel our- 
selves so far forth perfectly " brothered " in each 
other. We can all say " The Lord is my Shepherd," 
and ali confess together that it is only to this Shep- 
herd we can confidently look for green pastures to 
feed and repose in when we are hungry and tired, 
recovery to paths of righteousness when we go 
astray, a presence to cheer us, a rod and staff to 
comfort us when we move out toward the end, and 
forward into the dark. Denominational lines are 
not as much in our life as they are in our act, or 
even in our thought ; however deeply they may have 
been grooved, we quickly reach a spot that is deeper 
than the grooving, and in our wants we are all one 
again. 

To press this yet a little farther, dear friend, you 
that are not a Christian, we are all of us the sheep 
of his pasture. There are some here that I thought 
would certainly come out and own the Lord as their 
Shepherd before we came again to the end of our 
year ; but owning him or not, we are of his flock 
still ; straying sheep, but still belonging to his pas- 
ture ; lost upon the. mountains, but the sheep of his 
fold. The Prodigal Son did not cease to be a son. 
The very first word he spoke on his return home 
was " Father." He had never unlearned the w r ord. 
" He restoreth my soul," says the Psalmist, which 



THE LORD IS MT SHEPHERD. 131 

means that we roam off from the way, and with his 
shepherd-crook he seeks to coax us back. In the 
way or out of it, he has not let go his hold upon 
us ; lost on the mountains, but not even there be- 
yond the scope of shepherd-ownership or shepherd- 
care. 

" The Lord is my Shepherd" — perhaps you do 
not say it ; but when you hear it spoken, if spoken 
gently, or tenderly sung, there is stirred a sad echo 
in the lonely place that is in your soul, which is like 
the glow of fruit upon an inaccessible branch ; like 
the sound of distant falling water to one who is 
athirst. And so I do not bring to you any form of 
words to assent to ; I do not expatiate upon the 
wrong you have done yourself or him in going off 
for so long into pastures of your own choosing ; I 
only point you to him as the Good Shepherd, know- 
ing that whatever persuasions might be used, their 
cogency after all would come from the feeling that 
you have, that there are wants that this Psalm of the 
Shepherd reminds you of, and makes you tenderly 
feel, but wants that only the Shepherd of the Psalm 
can quite reach and altogether satisfy. 

David must have written this when he was a good 
deal more than a youth. The Psalm is not dated, 
yet its quality is its own date, as the wine-tester 
finds the age of the wine in the flavor of the wine. 
We should have known that it was the aged Paul 
that wrote the letter to Philemon, even if he had not 



132 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

called himself in it " Paul the aged." Time is a fac- 
tor in the arithmetic of all life and growth. Expe- 
rience and discernment ripen much in the same way 
as corn and wheat ripen. We ought to expect a 
great deal of an old Christian ; we ought not to ex- 
pect much of a young Christian, only to know that 
he grows ; as we do not estimate the worth of a 
young tree by its size, or by the amount that it pro- 
duces; we only require that it grow. Ripeness is 
not to be extemporized, nor is it transferable. Time 
is one factor, suffering is the other factor. The two 
multiplied together and the product sanctified, that 
is Christian maturity. I hardly think there is any 
other way. We pray for one spiritual enrichment 
and another very much as if we supposed graces 
were "custom-made;" or as though the giver of every 
good and perfect gift had little parcels of faith, and 
love, and gentleness, and peace, all measured out, 
done up, and ready to be delivered to suppliants in 
the order of application. We should be strangely 
off if God were not wiser in his giving than we are 
in our asking. " First the blade, then the ear, then 
the full corn in the ear." God's Spirit alive within 
us, but held under the pressure of labor and tempta- 
tion, and pain, that is the slow genesis of our gradual 
graces ; like the leaves on the tree which are deter- 
mined partly by the interior life and partly by the 
stern discipline of wind, storm, and sunshine, into 
which the interior life lets itself forth. They are 



THE LORD IS MT SHEPHERD. 133 

fruits of the Spirit, and subject to the economy of 
fruitage. 

This Psalm, diffusing the fragrance and tints of 
Christian mellowness, consistently betrays the tokens 
of years. The writer had learned the lesson of 
weariness — that is in the Psalm. He had passed 
under the discipline of sin — that is in the Psalm. 
He had learned to know himself by sinning, and 
learned to know God by enjoying the divine deliver- 
ance and recovery from sin : that is in the Psalm. 
He had tested God and found him faithful, and 
tested him so many times that he knew he would 
always be faithful. In bright, pleasant weather, he 
had become so intrenched in the might of God's 
great helpfulness, as. to be ready to go into the 
shadow, and into the night, knowing that however 
narrow and pent-in the valley might be, there would 
be at the other end of the valley an emergence into 
the light again, and that God's comfort would bring 
him forth from evening into a new morning. That 
is in the Psalm. The 23d Psalm is an old man's 
Psalm. We will not therefore try to forestall the 
autumn. We will not pray for gifts and graces with 
any such idea as that they will be a direct and in- 
stant conferment upon us ; but let them come in 
their own way, upon the boughs and twigs of 
time and endurance, seeking only to be knit into 
the life of God in Christ, and let the years of our life, 
and the toils and pains of them, work together with 



134 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

the Spirit to engender fruitage that shall be accord- 
ing to the economy of growth and the needs of our 
own day. 

The imagery of the Psalm suggests it to us as a 
passing lesson, that every man paints religious truth 
in the colors furnished by his own character of life 
and mode of occupation. Objects and relations 
that are familiar to us, furnish us with a vocabulary 
whose terms even the Holy Ghost himself will have 
to use if he is going to make to us any revelation. 
A shepherd, familiar only with pastoral relations, can 
apprehend the bearing of God toward us only under 
the figure of a shepherd. He thinks in that way. 
That is the groove along which his conceptions have 
to slide. David, also made familiar by his occupa- 
tion with the night stars, finds the glory of God 
beaming into his eyes along the avenue of the stars ; 
and the constellations that hovered over Syria and 
Arabia beam up into our eyes from out the Psalter 
and the Book of Job, the same constellations. So 
when the Lord preached to the common people of 
Galilee, he spelled the Gospel out to them in letters 
furnished by the common places of their own inter- 
ests and acquaintance. It is a wonderful Gospel, 
that can not only be translated into a thousand 
languages, but be told in a thousand different ways 
inside the same language. When he revealed the 
Holy Ghost to the water-carrier at Jacobs well, he 
took the language of the water-carrier, and told her 



THE LORD IS MT SHEPHERD. 135 

about a well of water bubbling up into everlasting 
life. Everybody has his own particular vocabulary, 
and a very small one at that, and if you cannot talk 
to him in his vocabulary, you cannot talk to him. 
By-and-by we are going to make earnest with that, 
and w T hen all the Christians get ready to enter in a 
thorough and intelligent way upon the work of con- 
verting the unschooled masses of our population, we 
are going to do it through preachers who know a 
good deal about the Lord, but not so much about 
the technicalities of academical curricula as to make 
them incompetent to feel, think, and pray in the 
exact thoughts, and experience, and imagery of the 
unlettered people they are trying to serve ; full of 
Bible and Holy Ghost, but able to speak to the peo- 
ple because they are of the people. 

The one impression that flows from off this entire 
Psalm, is that of a man who has come now where he 
is able and glad simply to trust, and let himself be 
taken care of ; and that, too, is a long and very slow 
lesson. Faith is distilled from unquiet experience. 
We have to learn to trust. In the interior, as in the 
outward world, storms have a large part to play in 
bringing forth fruit to perfection. The child by its 
tumbling and its bumps learns to cling closer to 
its mother's hand, which is the whole thing in a 
small way. (There is as good theology to be found 
in the nursery as in the seminary.) The failure of our 
plans is not as likely to be hardening as it is to be 



136 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 



mellowing. These lines have recently been written 
by one of our own number, who after years of de- 
clining health and enforced inaction, has just gone 
into the country to spend what will, we fear, be his 
last summer here; waiting, perhaps, only till the 
wheat is ripe before he too shall be gathered in by 
the Reaper. He writes : 

" Dear Lord ! my heart hath not a doubt 
That Thou dost compass me about, 
With sympathy divine ! 
The love for me once crucified, 
Is not the love to leave my side, 
But waiteth ever to divide 
Each smallest care of mine !" 

We do not take counsel of others till our own 
plans have begun to miscarry. We are almost as 
likely to succeed by our failure, as we are to be de- 
feated by our success. When the execution of our 
own will has shown itself a mistake, then our thoughts 
begin to feel along the track of our Lord's words 
when he said " Not my will but thine be done." 
We learn also to discover in the course of time that 
disappointment is not fatal. The petals fall off, but 
that gives more room for the outcome of what was 
already pushing underneath the petals, and we be- 
come suspicious that there is a wisdom that has 
fitted these things to one another, and been working 
invisible preparations. The secret of the whole 
curve is in the smallest arc of the curve, and yet we 
have to see considerable of that curve before we dis- 



THE LORD IS MT SHEPHERD. 137 

cover that its secret is a divine secret, and before we 
can feel like saying "He leadeth me," " It is the 
Lord that is shepherding me." Year by year as the 
small meanings of our life are disproved, they are 
"worked up " in the wider scheme that the Designer 
has drafted ; the crumbling remains of our broken 
hopes are economized and wrought into the perma- 
nent plan of our life-structure and service ; all brooks 
lead to the sea ; little by little we come to let our- 
selves down upon the support of the Everlasting 
Arms, give ourselves to the guidance of the Heav- 
enly Keeper, and by the time we have gotten to be 
as old as David, and have done and suffered as much 
as David, we are able to echo David if we have his 
spirit and to say back to him "The Lord is my Shep- 
herd, / shall not want." 

And true to the instincts of age, the Psalmist 
composes his picture from materials gathered in his 
boyhood, which is just like an old man. The Psalm 
is a reminiscence of his youth, and a quotation from 
his own shepherd-life upon the hill-slopes of Bethle- 
hem. There are two or three things there that might 
be mentioned, but we will only say this to the chil- 
dren. You know that David in his first years was a 
shepherd-boy, and it was then that he picked up the 
words and ideas that he puts into this Psalm. He 
had been a shepherd ; he had made his sheep to lie 
down in green pastures, and led them to where they 
could crop the grass growing down close by the edge 



138 THREE GA TES ON A SIDE. 

of still waters. The old scenes had during all the 
years remained in his memory, and quite likely when 
he wrote this Psalm, he was thinking of some partic- 
ular pasture, and some particular brook along by the 
edge of which he had once tended his own loved 
flock. Old things stay by us — that is what I want to 
say to the children. 

We never get entirely away from the things we 
lived among when we were little. We shall always 
be and think and do a great deal as we began being 
and thinking and doing when we were boys and girls. 
You will let me say in regard to myself, that the first 
twelve years of my life I spent in the country and 
upon the farm. There are a thousand ways in which 
my thoughts now and feelings and interests and 
ideas, are made and shaped by those twelve years on 
the farm. New England stays by me just as Bethle- 
hem stayed by David. 

You think you will be very different when you are 
grown up, from what you are now ; well, you will 
not be. You will be very much the same thing you 
are now, only more of it ; so that you ought to be 
careful now all the time, and see that you get a good, 
safe start. Suppose a little apple-tree two feet high, 
with two branches on opposite sides, and a third 
branch a little farther up on another side. Twenty 
years hence you come back and look at that tree ; 
the same three branches are there still — bigger, 
higher up, but the same ; the same sides of the tree, 



THE LORD IS MT SHEPHERD, 139 

same slant, same everything, only bigger. Look 
out, then, for the little branches. Let no branches 
begin to grow that it will not answer to have con- 
tinue to grow, for you cannot change them after 
they get fairly started, and it will hurt dreadfully 
to cut them off. Your young years will keep com- 
ing back to you, and Bethlehem will get into the 
Psalm. 

Only one thought more in a word. We have 
taken our text from the Old Testament, and yet 
perhaps we have felt that it is very much like the 
New in all that relates to its sweetness, tenderness 
and Gospel impulse. That is one way of putting it ; 
but the fact of the case is, we do not really read the 
Old Testament any more. An illustration will make 
my meaning plain. You go out in the morning at 
three or four o'clock, just as the first edge of the dawn 
has begun to tinge with twilight the objects of nature 
dispersed about you ; the air still folds itself around 
you damp and heavy, with only scattered intimations 
of shapeliness, and only dim suggestions of the 
beauty that still lies wrapt and slumbering. You go 
out an hour later, just as this great glorious world 
passes beneath the full baptism of the morning. 
The mountains, the rivers, the woods, the grass at 
your feet, are precisely what they were when at the 
first your eye moved along their uncertain outline. 
You are in the same world now as then, only now 
you are reading it by the light of the day that is 



140 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

come. That is the way we read this Psalm. This 
Psalm does not lie in the shadow of Sinai any longer : 
it is bathed in the sweet risen light of Calvary. 
"The Good Shepherd giveth his life for the sheep." 
The Good shepherd has given his life for the sheep. 



X 



Now the man out of whom the devils were de- 
farted besought him that he might be with him : 
but Jesus sent him away, saying, Return to thine 
oxvn house, and shozv how great thi?igs God hath 
done unto thee. And he went his way, and pub- 
lished throughout the whole city how great things 
Jesus had do?ie unto him. — Luke viii:38, 39. 

HERE is no knot here to be untied. The passage 
brings to us less a problem to be solved than a 
cartoon to be looked at. You have come in here, 
weary, out of another tired, warm week, with little 
disposition, probably, to work, least of all to do 
mental work. Spiritual and mental diet, like phys- 
ical, ought to vary in some little degree with the 
temperature and the weather and the calendar. We 
are only going to look for a few minutes, then, in an 
easy, leisurely way, at this picture, which shows to 
us the Gadarene delivered from the devil by Christ ; 
on the ground of that deliverance commissioned by 
Christ to preach, and instructed to make that deliv- 
erance the subject-matter of his preaching. The 
term here rendered " published " (" published through- 
out the whole city how great things Jesus had done 

(141) 



142 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

unto him") is the Greek kerusso, a word regularly 
translated " preach." "Go ye and preach the Gos- 
pel to every creature." " He sent them to preach 
the kingdom of God." Philip went down and 
preached Christ." " But we preach Christ crucified." 
u Preach the word ; be instant in season, out of sea- 
son." In all these instances, and great numbers be- 
sides (something like fifty), the word rendered 
" preach" is some form of this same word kerusso, 
that is here translated " published." There is, then, 
nothing exceptional about this particular instance. 

It all goes to show what a simple kind of thing 
preaching really is as it was originally conceived and 
practiced. The preacher was the "kerux," the her- 
ald, who simply went before and announced the ap- 
proach of his superior, or of something following on 
later. It comes out in the passage in Matthew rela- 
tive to John where it says : " In those days came 
John the Baptist heralding [not " crying"] in the wil- 
derness of Judea, and saying, Repent, for the king- 
dom of heaven is almost here." Exactly the office of 
a herald. 

What interests me, then, primarily in this scene is 
the simple complexion which it puts upon the matter 
of preaching, both as relates to the subject-matter of 
preaching and as relates also to the conditions upon 
which the being qualified to preach is by Christ made 
to depend. And let it be said, before we go further, 
that there is a constant necessity on our part of re- 



THE GADARENE PREACHER. 143 

curring to the old records. There is a steady ten- 
dency to depart from the simplicity of the Gospel, 
both as regards matter and manner. Considerable as 
is the work that has been done upon the Scriptures 
in the intervening centuries, and valuable as is the 
thought which the study of those Scriptures has en- 
eendered, it is still sometimes our wish that we 
might come to the original premises of the Gospel of 
Jesus without having to survey them through the 
medium of eighteen centuries of human inference 
and ratiocination. We can come back to the own 
words of the Lord, perhaps, but in studying those 
words we are unable to forget what A, B and C have 
said about those words, and, in time, what the Lord 
said; and what Augustine, Luther and Meyer said 
about what the Lord said come to be indistinguish- 
ably blended in our minds as all of it so much au- 
thoritative revelation direct from heaven. 

It is said in the last chapter of the Bible that " if 
any man shall add unto these things, God shall add 
unto him the plagues that are written in this book." 
And yet, practically, there is no book that, since the 
beginning of the Christian era, has been growing 
larger so fast as the Bible has. Everybody has his 
own little opinion about this and that in the 
Bible, either matters of doctrine or of practice or of 
church organization and methods, or whatever else, 
and these little opinions, almost without our know- 
ing it, stealthily creep into .the body of the work, 



144 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

and, although not very large to begin with, the Gos- 
pel is now, practically, the biggest book extant. 

You know how literary critics often write their own 
inferences or emendations on the margin, and how 
easy it is for these annotations, in a later edition, 
to become incorporated in the body of the work. 
That is a fair picture of what is practically all the 
time transpiring, not more with regard to the sacred 
books of our own faith than with those of other 
faiths. It is a fact with regard to every known re- 
ligion that its tendency has been in the direction of 
depreciation, and in just the way indicated. It is a 
statement of Max Mullens that every historic re- 
ligion is found to be purer and purer the nearer we 
come to its origin and to its primary records. What 
Christ criticised in the Pharisees was not their Mo- 
saism, but the accretions of human inference that 
had gathered around Mosaism — the traditions that 
had not only grown up out of the Word of God, but 
had mossed it over, and stifled it, and made the 
word of God of none effect. 

The very light and heat that are in a divine revela- 
tion themselves engender tradition, as the very heat 
of the sun is what creates the fog that hides the sun. 
You will discover the same fact by comparing the 
later religion and sacred books of East India with 
the original Vedas and the modes of religious faith 
and life that prevailed when the Vedas were com- 
posed. Likewise of Mohammedanism. Catholicism 



THE GADARENE PREACHER 145 

stands related to Jesuism (the religion of Jesus) 
very much as Phariseeism was related to Mosaism. 
The German Reformation was a process of slough- 
ing off tradition, and rubbing off the moss that for 
fifteen centuries had been overgrowing the tree of 
life. Now, the German Reformation was not a thing 
that could be done and stay done. You erase to-day 
the blur that gathers upon your mirror, but you will 
probably need to erase it to-morrow in the same way. 
And so there tends to grow up with us, as individuals, 
churches, and communions, every day, a little of that 
same coating of individual inference and ecclesiastical 
hypothesis which went on accumulating for fifteen 
hundred years, till it was all, or a good deal of it, 
ejected and rejected in the great upheaval of the six- 
teenth century. Germany then went back and drank 
direct at the well of life, instead of sucking through 
sixteen hundred years of dirty aqueduct. 

The steady drift of thought and of life is away 
from Christ, on the part of those who are Christians 
as well as on the part of those who are not ; on the 
side of the church as certainly as on the side of the 
schools. And it is precisely at the behest of this 
fact and tendency that I have been moved to select 
this passage from Luke, touching, as it does, upon 
matters that, at this distance of time, we can ea- 
sily get into confusion of thought and difference of 
opinion over, and stating these matters in a manner of 
unswerving directness and unblurred transparency. 



146 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

And the point I want to mention first, both for its 
own sake and for the sake of what comes after, is 
that the casting out of the devils from this Gadarene 
was Christ's own work. Now, we are not going to 
discuss the matter of demonology. You can con- 
strue this matter of devils and devilish possession 
literally or figuratively. Personally, I am so ortho- 
dox as to have implicit confidence in the doctrine of 
one great devil, and swarms, legions, of little devils. 
It surely fits Scripture phraseology ; it is a way of 
stating things that the mind can certainly take hold 
of more easily ; it explains some matters that are less 
explicable on the other view ; it is a belief that a 
man rather insensibly finds himself slipping into as 
he gets further down into the facts of his own life 
and heart ; and, withal, it is a good deal more credit- 
able to us individually that we can have these impish 
malefactors nestling within us to throw off just a lit- 
tle of the responsibility of our iniquity upon, than to 
have to carry the whole weight of our depravity 
upon our own unassisted shoulders. In other words, 
I would rather be obliged to say that I have a devil 
than be obliged to say that I am entirely my own 
devil. On the whole, it is not quite so damaging, 
saying nothing of its being more Scriptural. Treat 
that as you will, the fact remains. If we are not 
full of devils, we are at least full of devilishness ; 
things that need to be gotten out of us and that we 
have no power of our own to get out ; hateful im- 



THE GADARENE PREACHER. 147 

pulses that we can neither wear out, nor cut out, 
nor stone out. 

Now, right here we want to come out into open, 
distinct ground. Even we who have heard Christ 
preached for forty years, or perhaps preached 
him for forty years, need to put to ourselves 
some pretty pungent and direct questions. We talk 
about Christ, and go about beating doctrinal bushes 
and shaking theological trees, but are we teaching 
and believing in the doctrine of Christ as a personal 
and divine utility, competent to work in us to-day as 
practical and abrupt a work as he wrought in that 
old devil-possessed Gadarene? We are trying to 
urge men to give up their sins. Here is a man 
steeped in sensuality ; there is a woman crazy after 
style and millinery. Here is a man with a mono- 
mania for liquor, money, or power. We appeal to 
these people to forsake their cup, their filth, or their 
greed. We argue with them, we coax them, we en- 
tice them, we drive them, we fling Scripture at them, 
and hurl hot rhetoric at them. What is the use? 
A miser cannot break from his dollars, nor a silly girl 
from her flounces and furbelows, nor a sensualist 
from his cup and debauchery, any more than this 
Gadarene could leap free from the shackles of Satan. 
Now, that is the first broad meaning of Christianity, 
that it is a great divine emancipating hand breaking 
off our shackles , a great physician from another 
world entered into this to save us from soul-death 



148 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

and heal all our spiritual diseases. As pulpit and as 
pews we must beware or we shall let all the super- 
natural, or, rather, all the superhuman, evaporate out 
of our religion. 

Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the 
sins of the world. Brother, sister, are we thinking of 
Christ or talking about him as One that can do a 
positive work for us, and do it now, sharply and 
once for all as he did it for this Gadarene? To 
be sure, when we see a man who for twenty years 
has been the victim of alcohol, we do say to him 
that there are for him only two alternatives, Christ 
or a drunkard's grave. We put ourselves before him 
upon distinct evangelical grounds. We tell him, 
without circumlocution or ado, that he is powerless 
to help himself, and that God in Christ is omnipotent 
to help him. We don't save him, we don't pretend 
we can save him. We point him to Christ. We 
tell him where the Physician is that can save him. 
And in all that we are good, sound, thoroughgoing 
evangelical preachers of Jesus Christ. The Gospel 
is the power of God unto salvation — that is the dis- 
tinctive thing about it. It is not law simply, it is 
not idea simply — it is power, it works, it is the 
working of God upon us and in us; it rescues, 
cleanses, heals. And when we are talking to a 
drunkard (as I say), we do preach Christ and the 
devil-expelling power of Christ in a wholesome, or- 
thodox way. But a miser in love with his gold, a 



THE GADARENE PREACHER. 149 

woman in love with her own clothes, a libertine 
throttled by his own lusts, has no more power to 
break loose from his passion than has the rum- 
steeped sot to break loose from his. And there are 
shackles on us all that will cling there till the great 
Emancipator breaks them off from us. We each 
need to have done for us what we ourselves cannot 
do, but what Jesus Christ, the great Sickness-curer 
and Devil-expeller, can do. We all need him ; the 
man in the pulpit, the men and women down that 
aisle, just as certainly as the topers and prostitutes 
down in our Mission on the other avenue. We are 
all of us vastly better in our ideas than we are in our 
desires ; and only the omnipotence of God in Christ 
can lift us up from the level of our desires to the 
level of our ideas, and make us in fact what we are 
in aspiration, make us in our deed what we are in 
our prayers. 

And that point secured takes us right along to 
another. When the Gadarene had had the devils 
cast out of him, Christ said to him, "And now do 
you go right home, and tell your friends what I have 
done for you ; and he went his way, and preached 
throughout the whole city." You see what it was 
that made a preacher of him. You see what was 
the prime homiletical qualification of that evangelist 
out of Gadara. He was competent to point men to 
Christ as a Saviour because he had himself had Christ 
save him. It takes a great deal to make a man a 



150 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

preacher if he knows nothing about Christ. It takes 
amazingly little to make a man a preacher if he does 
know anything about Christ, if he has had Christ tell 
him anything, had him do anything for him, had him 
cast any devils out of him. And exactly as fast as this 
idea, that it is just Christ himself that is the great 
Worker, Emancipator, Healer, becomes the monop- 
olizing idea of the Christian Church in its ambition 
to get sin out of the world, just so fast there is going 
to be a diminishing disposition to emphasize minutiae 
and stickle for technicalities in the instance of those 
seeking formal recognition as preachers of the Gospel 
of Jesus Christ. 

The supreme demand is for men who can point 
the world to Jesus Christ, and can point with a 
steady, stiff finger, for the reason that they know ex- 
perimentally the saving power of Jesus Christ. It 
is very difficult even for the Protestant clergy to 
abandon utterly the idea of sacerdotalism, and to 
concede that their order is invested with no redemp- 
tive functions, and that it is the very acme of Chris- 
tian preaching simply to lift the eyes of the people 
to the cross and him that was crucified thereon. 
We cling with unconscious tenacity to the idea 
that somehow we save people. We are not think- 
ing of ourselves simply as index fingers, and that, 
other things being equal, he will always be 
the greatest preacher (in the true sense of greatest) 
who can best point men to Christ for the reason that 



THE GADARENE PREACHER. 151 

he best knows where and what Christ is. Hence the 
might of Luther, the colossus of the German Refor- 
mation — tore one whole book right out of the Bible 
and spat upon it, and yet made Christendom richer, 
mightier, holier, just because he had entered into the 
mystery of God in Christ and could point the gen- 
eration to where he had himself gone before. 

Luther was a great index finger pointing Germany 
to the Cross. He threw away the broken mugs and 
smashed the dirty pitchers out of which the gener- 
ations had been trying to drink the bailed water of 
life, and conducted them to the very edge of the liv- 
ing fountain flowing fresh and limpid. That was 
what Luther did. And yet Luther, Martin Luther, 
would have stood no more chance of receiving unan- 
imous ordination at the hands of the New York 
Presbytery than he would of being elected to the 
Papacy by the Roman Catholic Cardinalate. And 
still this old heretic, with this ragged Bible — book of 
James ripped clean out of it — did more to precipitate 
the kingdom of heaven than our whole synod could 
do, conservatives and progressives all pulling to- 
gether. That blind man whose eyes Jesus opened 
did not know much. He did not pass any kind of 
an examination. He could see, and Jesus had 
opened his eyes so that he could see. That was all 
he knew. Poor, little, miserable, shriveled creed, 
hedged all around with alternating exclamation 
and interrogation marks ! And yet that man, with 



152 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

only a thimbleful of ideas, and kicked out of the 
synagogue, with his opened eyes flushed with new- 
born light looking up gratefully into the eyes of the 
Lord, has already enticed more souls, probably, into 
the kingdom of the Eye-opener and Soul-saver than 
you and I have, laity and clergy all combined. The 
question is, Who is the man that knows the way to 
Jesus and can tell it ? 

But are we not insisting with more and more 
strenuousness that students of medicine should not 
be licensed to practice as physicians till they have 
been thoroughly drilled in all the minutiae of the 
science, and can assent heartily to the dogmas of the 
school in which they have been instructed ; and shall 
we be less critical and urgent in the instance of men 
who are aspiring to be the physicians of the soul ? 

But we are not aspiring to be physicians of the 
soul. That is just the point. We have had a great 
deal too much in the way of attempts at human re- 
demption, and that is a great part of the reason why 
men, churches, and communities are so long in get- 
ting well and becoming robust. We ministers are 
not physicians. There is nothing new about this. 
You remember what Peter said of the man healed at 
the gate of the Temple : " Be it known unto you 
all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name 
of Jesus Christ of Nazareth doth this man stand be- 
fore you whole. This is the stone which was set at 
naught of you builders, which is become the head of 



THE GADARENE PREACHER. 153 

the corner. Neither is there salvation in any other; 
for there is none other name under heaven given 
among men whereby we must be saved.' ' We are 
not physicians. 

The illustration just urged from the medical pro- 
fession does not illustrate, and has no kind of rele- 
vancy. Suppose that I have recovered from disease 
under the treatment of a homeopathic physician. A 
friend comes to me suffering from the same malady, 
and says to me, " You have had such and such a dis- 
ease, and such and such a homeopathic doctor cured 
you?" " Yes." "Will you be so kind as to give me 
his name and address? " "Well, my friend," I say, 
" I don't quite see how I can ; not being myself med- 
ically informed, it does not seem quite the thing that 
I should venture any information in regard to so 
difficult and delicate a matter." " I don't care 
whether you have got any medical information or 
not ; that is not what I want of you. I only want 
you to tell me the street and number of your doctor." 
" I understand that very well ; but there are some 
very funny things about homeopathy, and although 
it does cure men almost magically, still I am afraid 
that there are some little points involved in that sys- 
tem that I am not quite sound upon. As regards 
all its essential principles I am a homeopathist, 
heart, soul, and body, and whenever I am sick never 
think of applying to a physician of any other school." 
" I don't care for all that rigmarole. It has nothing 



154 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

to do with my case. You believe in your physician, 
and say he has cured you. Now can't you be neigh- 
borly and humane enough to tell me where he 
lives ?" "Be patient, my friend. This hesitancy on 
my part may seem a little harsh, I grant, especially 
as you are suffering, and I know my physician could 
instantly relieve you ; and, besides that, he is only a 
few doors away. Still, this is a delicate matter. 
Medicine is no common affair. Things must be done 
decently and in order. Strange as it may seem, I 
suppose it really would be better for you to suffer — 
shall I say to die ? — than for one in my condition and 
situation to take any kind of overt part in the mat- 
ter." " But can't you just simply tell me where he 
lives ?" " Don't lose your temper. There are some 
deep psychological principles involved here. I have 
already indicated that, heartily as I believe in home- 
opathy, there are some frontier matters that I have a 
question about. And doubt spreads. It is like 
musk, the possibilities of all-pervasiveness are in it. 
One loose brick is a menace to the whole building. 
It is in medicine just as the clergymen say it is in theol- 
ogy when, if you ask whether an interrogation point 
in the Bible ought'nt to have been a period, you are 
really right on the edge of giving up the whole Bible. 
I would like to answer your question, and it seems to 
me that I could answer it in a way that would not 
mislead you ; but we must remember that a small 
doubt off in one corner of the mind really invalidates 



THE GADAREXE PREACHER. 155 

every mental process from circumference to center. 
Besides all that, I have not yet told you the worst. 
I have read considerably the writings of Hahne- 
mann, the father of homeopathy, myself, and I find 
a few things there that it seems to me would be just 
as well omitted ; fully as well. I do not say that it 
is so — it only seems to me as though it might be so. 
Some things, too, not closely germane to the main 
theme, that, to my judgment, have not exactly the 
ring of Hahnemann's mind ; and in the solitude of 
my own room and in the quiet of the night I have 
even ventured to wonder whether possibly they are 
not due to some other mind and hand than that of 
Hahnemann. Xo, my friend, I am sorry I cannot 
give you the address of my great physician. He 
could cure you — I know he could. But we must be 
consistent. We have got to draw the line some- 
where. Let me certify you of my tender interest in 
your case ; and if your disease should prove fatal, as 
it certainly will if you do not consult the physician, 
let me assure you that among all who will be in at- 
tendance at your obsequies there will not be one 
who will mourn with a sincerer grief or shed a more 
bitter tear." 

You will see the bearing of the illustration. We 
do not claim that it is just in all of its details. It at 
least lets us see that we are not ourselves physicians, 
but that ignorance of the technicalities of the heal- 
ing art, doubts in regard to some matters collateral 



156 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

with the healing art, do nothing toward disqualifying 
us from pointing sin-sick souls to the Great Physician, 
if we have ourselves known experimentally the ben- 
efits of his treatment. Whether it be preaching in 
the home, preaching in the street, preaching in the 
Sunday-school, preaching in the mission, preaching 
behind a regulation pulpit, preaching is preaching, 
and in its distinctive feature it is a matter of leading 
men to Jesus Christ ; and the question, beside which 
all others sink into comparative insignificance, first 
to be asked of one who desires to be set apart in a 
formal way to the work of the Christian ministry is, 
Are you competent to bring men to a knowledge of 
Jesus Christ and to an experience of his saving 
grace? You remember that the disciples encoun- 
tered a man who was doing good work in the name 
of Christ, but who declined in some respects to train 
with them. Christ said, He is casting out devils? 
Yes. Casting them out in my name ? Yes. Don't 
forbid him. That you find in Mark, ninth chapter, 
thirty-eighth verse. 



XI 

Wxz Itttd^tr Plan. 



Inasmuch as Te Have Done It Unto One of the 
Least of These My Brethren, Te Have Done It 
Unto Me. — Matthew xxv:j$jO. 

HOPE we have well in mind the whole passage 
read this morning, out of which this detached 
clause comes. It is familiar, it is simple, it can mean 
only one thing, and no more needs expounding than 
there is need of a candle to find glowworms or ferret 
out sunshine, and is as innocent of dogmatism as a 
bird's song or a field of sweet clover. 

" Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the 
least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto 
Me." We are all interested to know exactly what 
the Lord thought, and where his sympathies lay. 
You know a man when you know what he likes. 
You know the Lord when you know what he likes, 
and what it is that his thoughts are busy about, and 
his interests gather around. The Lord sympathized 
with the under man. He stayed with the man that 
had been left behind. The Lord was the arch- 
Samaritan. I am so bound up, he said, with every 

(157) 



158 THREE GATES ON A SIDE 

one that is hungry and thirsty and lonesome and rag- 
ged and sick, that whoever relieves him relieves me. 
He is on the side of the man that is down. The sick 
and poor and fallen were his favorites. The ninety 
and nine he abandoned, and went hunting after the 
one that was lost. He never lingered around the 
fold, counting the sheep that were inside. Wicked 
people he did not blame. He was not here to blame, 
but to save. He picked for the diseased and the 
vile. A good man he had little immediate interest 
in, any more than physicians are interested in well 
men, or undertakers in live men. He counteracted 
nature and controverted society. 

Society kicks the man that is down. So does na- 
ture. From him that hath not, shall be taken even 
that which he seemeth to have. To him that hath, 
shall be given. That is nature, and that is public 
sentiment. Success succeeds ; failure grows more 
and more ruinous. The more a man knows, the 
easier it is for him to know more. The more a man 
gets, the easier it is for him to get more. The more 
friends a man has, with the more facility he can 
multiply friends. Only the best survive ; the worst 
go to the wall. There is no chance for the rear rank, 
whether physically, intellectually, or morally. 

The Darwinian doctrine of the survival of the 
fittest, is now generally conceded. It is here that 
grace steps in, and says " We must see what we can 
do for the man that is behind ; try and help a man 



THE UNDER MAN. 159 

survive even if he is not the fittest ; if he is lame, 
furnish him a horse so that he can ride ; if he is in 
the rear, coach him ; if his cerebral tissue is less 
finely organized, make available to him the workings 
of some one's else brain ; if his moral springtime is 
backward, fit up for him a little ethical conservatory 
with steam heat and a southern exposure, where the 
buds will have given them a little judicious stimulat- 
ing and pushing/' Barbarism says, If a man is sick, 
kill him ! Civilization says, If a man is sick, send for 
a doctor. Mosaism said, If a man is wicked, stone 
him ! Christ says, No ; take care of him and save 
him. That is the meaning of the Gospel — take care 
of him and save him. The proverb says, " The devil 
take the hindermost." Christ steps in and says, "I 
will take the hindermost." Nature and society sym- 
pathize with the people that are in front ; Christ and 
the Gospel with them that are behind. 

The Lord's sympathies being what they are, then, 
it becomes a very easy matter to do that which will 
be pleasing to the Lord, and procure us acceptance 
with him. It is easy to get on the right side of a 
man when you know where his sympathies are. The 
passage teaches as plainly as simple language can, 
that we shall win the Lord's favor by interesting 
ourselves in those that he is interested in. If you 
want to make friends of a man, you know there is no 
better way than by making friends of his children. 
If we want to make at friend of Christ there is no 



160 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

readier way than to make friends of those to whom 
his own interest and affection are particulary given. 
We are not going to win God's favor by the bare 
asking for it. Whatever notions we may happen to 
hold upon the matter of " effectual calling " and " di- 
vine election/' we have a good deal to do in order 
to " make our calling and election sure." Even the 
doctrine of salvation by works, has a good deal to be 
said in its behalf, when properly interpreted. The 
more thoroughly our minds become saturated with 
the words and teachings of Christ, the more innocent 
his whole doctrine and dealing becomes of anything 
like legerdemain — anything like being tricked into 
the kingdom of heaven without personal co-operation 
on our own part. 

For purposes of practical, everyday guidance, one 
plain thing said by the Lord is worth ten astute 
things said by a theologian or even by an Apostle. It 
is as good as told us here that God's favor is assured 
to us if we are interested in his interests, and our 
sympathies lie in the same spot of destitution, suffer- 
ing, and sin, where his lie. The Lord is so surpris- 
ingly simple in what he says, that it is sometimes ex- 
ceedingly difficult to take him at his word. If a 
man comes to me and says, What must I do in order 
that I may be found at the last at God's right hand 
(using the imagery of this chapter), it is with hesi- 
tancy that we state the case exactly as the Lord 
stated it here, and tell him that he will be saved if his 



THE UNDER MAN. 161 

sympathies are with the under man, and he feeds the 
hungry, ministers to the sick, and looks after those 
that are in prison. Those of us that have been 
catechetically schooled, are a little afraid that it is 
not quite orthodox to put the matter in that way, 
notwithstanding the Lord does. 

It is a great thing to be able to keep our ortho- 
doxy so judiciously tethered, as not to have it nip 
off the tender buds that grow on the branches of the 
tree of life. We have been so habituated to pre- 
scribed ways of thinking about these matters, that 
we involuntarily discount modes of act, and modes of 
sympathy even, that do not issue from those ways 
of thinking. Unless all signs fail, there is a great 
change coming over the Church in this particular. 
Christianity is going to be more and more distinctly 
differenced in men's minds from theology. We are 
going to put a higher price on Christly living and 
Christly sympathy, regardless of the special modes 
of thinking that were their cerebral accompaniment, 
just as we prize a diamond whether it be an idol's 
eye or adorns a lady's ring, or be set in the clasp of 
a volume of the New Testament. All of this has 
been so drilled into us, that it is hard to emancipate 
ourselves from its thraldom ; but the day of better 
liberty is on its way. Ten years hence, even so 
conservative and scholarly a Church as the Presbyte^ 
rian, I venture to say, will lay less of its emphasis on 
intellectual processes and more on moral condition 



162 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

and personal sympathies. The best disciple of Christ 
and the best minister of Christ will doubtless be he 
who best reproduces Christ in his own loves and lov- 
ing activities. We are not underrating accurate think- 
ing ; but that is only means to an end ; and Christ- 
likeness is substantially precious, however thick a 
bed of notional rubbish it may be inclosed withal, 
and the Christ-likeness will do more to dignify the 
rubbish than the rubbish will do to discount the 
Christ-likeness. 

And it is noteworthy how just this aspect of the 
case is treated by the Lord in our story. Of those 
who are here represented as gathered at his right 
hand, it is safe to suppose that most had never seen 
the Lord, and it is presumable that some had never 
heard of him in his incarnate character; so that upon 
saying to them, " When I was in prison, ye visited 
me," they, in all accuracy of thinking, answered him, 
" That cannot be, for we have never seen you, per- 
haps not even heard of you." Whereupon he an- 
swers, " You have done it to me in doing it to 
them." Whether you are aware of it or not, makes 
no difference. The quality of the act remains the 
same, whether you do or do not appreciate its reach. 
It is the quality of your sympathy that counts, and 
not the direction in which, at the time, your thoughts 
happened to be running. We have got to remember 
that a great deal of current opinion about these mat- 
ters is an inheritance from the scholastics, who were 



THE UNDER MAN. 163 

a great number of them, more clear-headed than they 
were clean-hearted, and to whose eternal interests it 
would therefore be that the Lord should lay more 
stress on theological subtlety than on spiritual piety 
and evinced Christ-likeness. And the scholastic 
spirit in these matters is not dead yet. All we can 
say of it is that it is doomed ; and the good Lord 
hasten the day of its dissolution. 

There are some of us who will find a good deal of 
mental relief in the assurance that Christ accepts as 
loyalty to him, loving ministry shown to his dis- 
tressed and needy brethren everywhere. No one 
doubts the affectionate regard which Jesus had for 
the woman who anointed his feet at Bethany. It 
is a great comfort to know that as he felt toward 
her, so he feels toward us whenever we come to any 
distressed person with ministering services involving 
the same quality of loving allegiance and self-sacri- 
fice as hers. 

We know what it is to love a father, mother, hus- 
band, wife, child ; but it is not easy to say how much 
of exactly that same kind of love there is for Jesus 
Christ, or for God the Father, or for the Holy Spirit. 
Sensuous creatures that we are, our loves require 
some kind ot sensible support. Even Christ, with all 
the definiteness of form in which he once appeared, 
is now to us either simply a memory, or, if a pres- 
ence, only intangibly such. In thinking of him, 
there is a certain confusion and bewilderment of 



264 THREE GATES ON A SIDE 

thought which embarrasses the simple process and 
exercise of love toward him. Some experience this 
perplexity more keenly than others. Even John 
grazes close upon the edge of this difficulty when he 
says, " If a man love not his brother whom he hath 
seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" 
We love better when we can see what we are loving, 
or, at least, when there is no element of confusion or 
of mystery to interrupt the even current of our love. 
And therefore there is encouragement in the intima- 
tion given here that our love for the distressed is 
counted as love for Christ. He so identifies himself 
with the sick and suffering, that to him it is all one 
whether we love him or them. He knows that if we 
do love them, we would love him if we could see him. 
And that is not quite all there is to it. Crediting 
us with love to him when it is others we are loving, 
is not an act of u make-believe " on Christ's part. 
Love of the kind now under review, is a singular 
thing. It is in this like a mirror, that it is adapted 
to everything that comes in front of it, no matter 
what. It has a universal property, and is relevant to 
everything that is lovable, little or great, human or 
divine. The 13th of 1st Corinthians, therefore, 
which expatiates upon love with such wondrous 
beauty, says nothing about any particular direction 
love is to take. There is nothing specific about love 
to God in the chapter, nothing specific about love to 
man in the chapter ; just as when we are talking 



THE UNDER MAN. 165 

about light, we do not need to say the light that 
shines out into the spaces and gilds the stars, or the 
light that shines down upon the earth and transfig- 
ures the hills, or makes trembling gems out of the 
dewdrops. It is all one, and relevant to whatever is 
in its range. It is interesting, then, to notice that 
the New Revision reads, not " We love him be- 
cause he first loved us," but " We love because he 
first loved us;" leaving the object indefinite, because, 
like light, all possibilities of direction are in it. 

This verse of ours also endows all the poor and des- 
titute and fallen with a certain divine dignity. If the 
next time you meet a poor wretch on the street you 
remember that Christ stands in such a relation to 
him, that what service of love you render to him 
Christ is going to consider as rendered to himself, it 
will not be quite so easy to turn the cold shoulder 
to his request or ignore his destitution. I know the 
chances are as a hundred to one that the man is a 
fraud. But let us remember these two things : the 
first is, that we are all of us more or less of a fraud ; 
and second, that being fraudulent makes a man not 
less needy of succor, but more so. If a man is only 
hungry, why then ten cents' worth of bread will 
cover the whole case ; but if he is hungry and knav- 
ish, too, it will take a great deal beside ten cents to 
cover the case. It was that that made redemption 
necessary. If the world had been merely destitute 
of daily food, the thing could have been by God 



166 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 



easily arranged. He could have supplied the races 
with manna as in Old Testament times, or adopted 
some other policy that would have been its equiva- 
lent. But it is because the genus we belong to is a 
genus of frauds that something beside bread was 
necessary, and the Son of God had to come into the 
world and save us by the giving to us of himself. 

As the meaning of this whole story and of the 
ministrant life of Jesus becomes more clearly un- 
folded to our understandings and to our hearts, we 
are going to attach a wider and richer significance to 
the whole matter of Christian discipleship. We can 
only touch upon this here. The world has learned 
a great deal since the time when the woman at 
Bethany tried to attest her love to Christ by pouring 
something like a hundred dollars' worth of perfumery 
upon his feet. That is no impeachment of the 
beauty of spirit that prompted the expenditure. 
But it was lacking in reason in just about the same 
measure that it abounded in love. We have occas- 
ional church hymns which express practically very 
much the same thing that she expressed aromatic- 
ally. The thing which we are coming to under- 
stand, is that loyalty to Christ means not only loyalty 
to his person, but loyalty to everything that he rep- 
resents in the world. It means espousing him, but 
it means espousing his cause. The movement is in 
this direction, but there is need of a good deal of 
thorough instruction and of conspicuous example in 



THE UNDER MAN. 167 

the matter. It was a simpler thing in the old times 
to observe appointed days to offer up burnt sacrifices 
(or employ some one to do it) and attend to the 
periodic reading of prescribed portions of Scripture, 
than it was to undertake the work which God has 
always had upon his own heart and in his own pur- 
pose of recovering the race from its untoward estate, 
and augmenting the opportunities of the ill-condi- 
tioned. So it is still everywhere easier to be pious 
than it is to be Christian ; easier to attest our allegi- 
ance to Christ by methodical attendance upon his 
worship, stated perusal of convenient chapters of 
his history, repetition of devout prayers, and periodic 
celebration of his dying love, than to enter with 
heart, intelligence and power into that work of com- 
forting, quickening, strengthening, and in all ways 
recovering the rear ranks of society which Christ in- 
augurated and champions. . 

To be a Christian is business as well as pleasure ; 
it is occupation as well as luxury ; it is stout perform- 
ance as well as holy exercises ; it is belonging to the 
front rank of society, but marching with the rear 
rank, and helping to carry the knapsack of those that 
are tired ; it is being respectable ourselves and fos- 
tering respectability among the disreputable ; it is 
surviving because we are fit ; and it is taking those 
that are not fit to survive and making them fit. 
Loyalty to Christ means carrying forward in our 
century the work he began in his ; not only worship- 



168 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

ing him on our knees, but working with him on our 
feet ; not only keeping up with the rush of the times 
and the push of necessity ourselves, but helping to 
keep in trim and in step some poor stragglers that 
have fallen out, and that have no heart and sound 
legs to keep up with. 

And there is a distinct movement in this direction. 
That is the present drift of thought. Not only are 
the clergy preaching it, but there is among the laity 
a clear waking up to practical issues, a distinct sense 
of results to be wrought, an appreciation that the 
gifts conferred by Christ are not to be taken as 
spiritual bric-a-brac, and employed only to ornament 
our own souls and decorate our own future, but that 
they are replete with the potencies of effect, and are to 
become as fountains opened up in the wilderness, 
perennially fringed with an environment of verdure 
and of blossom. Men and women are getting at the 
distinct import of Christianity as an enterprise for 
the accomplishment of definite results, for the work- 
ing of specific changes in the condition of men and 
of the times. Enlistments in this service are being 
continually reported of those who are making it a 
part of their stated business to fulfill just the offices 
particularized in our text ; of some so circumstanced 
pecuniarily, that their whole time and thought are de- 
voted to this end. 

There is a gain all around in the clearness with 
which the work that is to be done is being appre- 



THE UNDER MAN. 160 

ciated. And there is something in the general heart 
to which all such devotement urgently appeals. 
There is a good deal of chivalry within us when we get 
to where it is. A man may be selfish in his interests 
and confined in his purposes, but we all carry in our 
hearts a chord that responds to the touch of any deed 
of self-denying heroism. Livingstone, Gordon, Han- 
nington and Stanley (all of them identified with the 
Continent of Africa) blossom in the regards of the 
whole civilized world by virtue of the self-sacrificing 
chivalry that animates them. Hardly a paper that 
I have taken up in the last two weeks, that has not 
had its tender tribute for Father Damien, the Roman 
Catholic priest from Belgium, who went out sixteen 
years ago to minister to the leper colony in the 
Sandwich Islands, and contracted there the same 
loathsome disease, from which he has just died. 
He added nothing to the stock of the world's infor- 
mation, he made no money ; but he wonderfully les- 
sened the pains of human misery, completely revolu- 
tionized in every respect that wretched community, 
has laid his hand in blessing upon an entire world, 
has thrilled with warm and tender enthusiasm every 
soul that has been made at all acquainted with the 
scope of his work and the glorious spirit that ani- 
mated it, and has made the religion of Jesus mean 
more to the great, impatient, longing heart of our 
generation. The world is richer for Father Damien ; 
the future is going to be richer for him. In the 



170 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

abounding wealth of his life and heroic sweetness of 
his ministry, he is so much wider than any particular 
phase of doctrine, so much broader than any special 
ecclesiastical limitation, that the world cares very little 
what his particular Christian views were, or whether 
he was Protestant or Catholic. We libel him by 
labeling him. Damien was Christian. He satisfied 
the hopes of I Cor. xiii. and fulfilled the law of 
Christ. 

And the world has been drawn a little nearer to 
Calvary, because of those sixteen years of human 
cross-bearing passed in the desolate leprous island of 
Molokai; and we, some of us, see a little more dis- 
tinctly than we did before, that it is not so much by 
talking in set phrases about Christ, as it is by living 
in self-forgetting ministry like Christ, that this city, 
country, and world of ours, is to become a part of 
the kingdom of Christ. 



XII 

******** 

I Go a-Fishing. — John xxi:3. 

HE depth of a river we never estimate by the 
amount of water that happens to be running 
in it in a flush season. Any stream can easily be 
deep (and it denote nothing) when the snows are 
melting on the hill-tops, or the spring rains copiously 
dropping on their slopes. How much water does 
the river carry to the sea when only normal supplies 
are feeding it ? Does the mid-channel show bare on 
the 15th of July? 

Peter said to them: " I go a-fishing." To Peter 
and his colleagues it had been a strange three years ; 
forty-two months of bewilderment ; during which 
they had heard words the like of which had never 
been spoken, and seen deeds the parallel of which 
had never been done. The hopes of Israel had been 
wondrously excited by the appearance in its midst 
of what purported to be the Deliverer. " Lord, 
wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to 
Israel ?" Jewry was suspended upon the tenter-hook 
of a trembling patriotic expectation. The Twelve, 

(171) 



172 THREE GA TES ON A SIDE. 

as standing nearest to him, looked confidently for 
places of preferment in the new regime of temporal 
domain which it was anticipated the wonderful con- 
queror out of Bethlehem would presently inaugurate. 
Had not he himself promised them, saying, "Verily 
I say unto you, that ye which have followed me, in 
the regeneration when the Son of Man shall sit in 
the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve 
thrones, one of you upon each throne, judging the 
twelve tribes of Israel. " In such a realistic way did 
all this lie in the minds of the people that the am- 
bitious mother of two of the inner circle of the 
Lord's adherents begged of him that he would grant 
to her sons the two highest positions of power when 
once he was established in his kingdom. And 
hardly could Peter, w r ho evidently occupied a kind 
of primacy in the Lord's regard, have anticipated 
anything less for himself than a sort of premiership 
in the soon-to-be-inaugurated sovereignty of Jesus 
Christ. 

The whole trend of natural thought and of old- 
time purpose had thus been interrupted. The last 
three years stood almost in no relation with the 
years that had anteceded them. Those three years 
were like what the geologists call a " fault " in the 
rock, where, as the result of upheaval or subsidence 
the continuity of the stratum is suddenly and sharply 
broken, old lines of formation abruptly closed, new 
lines as abruptly begun. It had been with Peter 



I GO A- FISHING. 173 



and his associates like moving into a new world. 
The man of Galilee had put a changed complexion 
upon their present, and frescoed with glowing an- 
ticipations the broadly opening future. Their 
thoughts had been taught to bend to a higher alti- 
tude ; their affections had learned to flow toward 
finer and remoter ends. The wealthy significance of 
the times into which they had moved pressed upon 
and diminished the meaning of the years that had 
gone by. Old scenes were crowded into a shrunken 
and shadowed perspective. Brightened by new and 
fresh associations, old places and occupations had 
ceased to glisten with the meaning they had formerly 
worn. Places and employments were inscribed with 
a new intent. The Lake of Gennesaret, the boats, 
the nets, and all the fishing tackle, were fading out 
of their present experience, and becoming more and 
more a part only of other days, and an earlier chap- 
ter. All was the same, and still, how altered ! It 
was like our going back to ground that we knew in 
our childhood. The rivers flow with the same cur- 
rent ; the rocks are gray with the same moss, the hills 
fall off with the same slope ; there is the same old 
dirge sung out among the night branches, the same 
old sigh breathed among the noontide pines ; but 
withal it is the same, it is still quite new. for all the 
experience garnered since lies in our heart, eye and 
ear, to coat with strange confusion the old places 
and scenes, and mix in helpless perplexity the old 



174 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

with the new. So we can imagine the disciples 
treading the familiar beach, looking out over the 
sea upon which their wild fisherman-life had been 
led, but with all the utensils and accompaniments 
of their craft made a little dim and unreal by the 
new life, the new associations, the new anticipations, 
that have sprung up between them. We can fancy 
Peter, in company with the Lord, stepping along by 
the lake-side, surveying the disused boats as they 
creaked one against another and chafed the beach, 
looking out onto the restless, wind-driven sea, and 
thanking the Lord that his hard old fisherman days 
and nights are ail by. Poor Peter ! 

Another shake of the kaleidoscope ; another jar of 
the firmament and forthwith another " fault " in the 
rock. Lines of stratification again terminate as 
suddenly as they began. New lines appear which 
are but the recurrence of the old, old lines. The 
Lord is dead. The days that preceded their inti- 
macy with the Lord are back again. It is true the 
buried body has emerged from the grave, but a mys- 
tic distance has crept in between them and the Mas- 
ter with whom in times past they have consorted 
with so much of freedom and intimacy. They have 
touched him since he rose, but at the same time they 
have lost touch with him. He reappears among 
them on occasion, but in ways that startle and that 
are a bit weird, and the old constancy of easy inter- 
change is at an end. The chapter has reached its 



I GO A-FISHING. 175 

close. His victory over the grave has made him 
greater, vaster in their regard, but he has ceased to 
mean much to them as relates to the practicalities 
and business of their everyday life. They are not 
thinking any more about thrones and a premiership. 
They have got now to go on without him. Peter 
whose thoughts had soared highest, was the one we 
suppose to feel most quickly and keenly the altered 
prospect. The twelve are thrown back upon them 
selves and upon each other. The distant past re 
verts to them again. The three years now closed 
begin to seem a little unreal, dreamy. It was like 
waking from visionary engagements, purposes and 
ideals, to the hard and gritty substantiate of toilsome 
common-place life. Old necessities assert them- 
selves. Old pathways open out before them in stern 
invitation. Old occupations intrude themselves. 
There remains nothing for them now but to take up 
again the old life ; and Peter said unto them, " I go 
a-fishing." 

The pathos that is in those words of Peter can be 
understood only by reading imaginatively between 
the lines as we have just been attempting to do ; or, 
better, can be understood really only by those out 
of whose life similarly a great hope has vanished, a 
bright light disappeared. Probably there are very 
few among us this morning whose own experience 
does not kindle the sad but brave words of Peter 
with a plaintive meaning. There are some who 



176 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

come in here from Sunday to Sunday that com- 
menced life in very ordinary not to say straitened 
circumstances. Their modes of life were simple and 
painstaking, exempt from material amenities, and 
yet a life that was fairly comfortable, because not 
personally knowing to anything that was different. 
In course of time, however, a brighter star arose 
upon them, little comforts and larger luxuries one 
by one began to blossom out around them on this 
side and on that ; more commodious and more ele- 
gant quarters were secured for their occupancy, and 
life becomes to them a brighter, broader and more 
glistening thing. But no company has been organ- 
ized yet that insures against reverses. Catastrophe 
came ; investments proved themselves at fault ; lux- 
uries that had blossomed forth so beauteously, one 
after another were frost-nipped ; the carriage was 
disposed of, the servants dismissed ; finally the house 
on the ayenue, the mansion on the corner, somehow 
slipped out of their possession ; the old cramped 
years, the little contracted house came back again ; 
small ways were resumed, meager satisfactions re- 
turned dressed in their old garb ; the years that had 
intervened grew unreal, like night-dreams revived 
under cold sunlight; and Peter, sad, brave Peter, 
said to his colleagues, " Yes, the new is gone, the old 
is come again ; the lake and the boats are back 
among us once more. I go a-fishing." 

Very likely there is some one here whose youth, 



I GO A-FISHING. 177 

with the advancing days, glowed with the brightness 
of large resolve and with the sunshine of far-reaching 
and wide-reaching purpose. He went on through 
the forenoon years of life influenced with the con- 
stant inspiration of valiant aims. The power for 
good and for blessing that he expected eventually 
to be, stirred in him with the potency of a ceaseless 
and a glowing motive. He lived and worked in the 
light of grand days that were to come and that were 
to be of his own producing, of chivalrous deeds not 
yet done that were to be of his own performing. But 
the sun, so splendid in its dawning, slipped presently 
behind a cloud. The air grew somber and heavy. 
A blight fell upon our hopeful young adventurer. 
The open doors that conducted his thought into so 
roomy and roseate a future swung to, and immured 
him in the small, meager chafing present. He fell back 
into his early years again ; day became to him an inces- 
sant endless twilight ; the few glowing years that have 
intervened grew unreal, like night-dreams surveyed 
under cold sunlight ; and Peter, sad, brave Peter, 
said to his colleagues : Yes, the new is gone ; the 
old is come again ; the lake and the boats are back 
among us once more : " I go a-fishing." 

Quite as likely, however, the lesson has been 
learned by you in still a different way : As a young 
man or young woman you may have emerged from 
the home of your early years, rich in the genial in- 
fluences with which the home-atmosphere was 



178 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

freighted. You gradually entered into new condi- 
tions and contracted new relations, time and decay 
gradually removing from beneath you, meanwhile, 
the parental supports upon which once your whole 
life was stayed, the parental lights in which once 
your whole life was centered. The removal of pa- 
rental support, however, only lets you down more 
completely upon the undergirding of the new stay 
and staff upon which you have fixed yourself ; and 
however loyal to parental memory, you still feel 
yourself fast woven into the firm fabric- of a little 
domestic world of your own. Your companion, with 
perhaps a little growing pledge of conjugal affection, 
makes out for you a little realm of pure felicity. 
But, as so many of you in such circumstances have 
sadly known, while we have life-insurance companies 
without number, we have no companies that assure 
against death. Your home (I speak it to you whose 
own experience has run on :n advance of my words), 
your home has known the agony of mortal invasion. 
The companion upon whom you leaned, the child 
upon which your long loves, hopes and aspirations 
have been centered, has been borrowed to beautify, 
against your coming, the home on high. So long as 
the cheek was warm with even a fading flush you 
felt that he was still with you and was still yours, a 
part of you, and of your life. And even when the 
pulse rested^ the face so suggestive of the loved 
spirit that had quickened and molded it, seemed still 



I GO A-FISHING. 170 

to prolong to you the companionship that had 
formed so large a part in your little domestic realm. 
But when the casket had been closed, and when you 
looked down upon the fresh mound of green turf in 
the churchyard, and still more when you came back 
to the places hallowed by sweet association and 
fragrant with holy memory — yes, "memory" is the 
word in which the agony is lodged — nothing to you 
now but a memory ; no longer a part of your hourly 
life ; the sweet years surviving like a tender melody 
floating in the air and melting more and more into 
silence ; like a beautiful dream which grows more 
and more unreal as you review it under the cold sun- 
light. Nothing left you but to go back, away back 
and take up the old life. And Peter, sad, brave 
Peter, said to his companions : Yes, the new is gone, 
the old is all come again, the lake and the boats are 
back among us once more : " I go a-fishing." To 
some of us this language of Peter will mean more in 
the time to come than it has in the time past. 

Now, in concluding our study, there are three 
points to which I desire briefly to advert : The first 
is that the disappearance out of his life of the new 
hopes and anticipations that had come to mean so 
much to him, let us see exactly how much there was 
to Peter before ever the Lord came to him and in a 
ministering way dealt with him and fostered 
and stimulated him. The" spring snows have stopped 
melting and the April showers have ceased falling, 



180 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

but the stream keeps on bearing its freight of water 
steadily toward the sea. There was already in him 
that permanent momentum of character and pur- 
pose that kept him upon his feet and kept him upon 
the road even after the motives that had newly 
come to him had ceased to act. This is part ex- 
planation of the power of Peter's life and the dis- 
tinguished eminence to which the Lord elected 
him. He could get along comfortably with a mini- 
mum of stimulus. He was not broken down by dis- 
appointment. Peter was not frangible. He had 
been wonderfully wrought upon by the intimations 
that his three years of intercourse with the Lord 
had brought to him. Everything had become new 
to him ; a new world, a new life, a new future ; and 
yet, if it was necessary, he could go back to the old 
world, the old life and the old past, and take up his 
disused comforts, and brush up his rusted occupa- 
tions and do it heartily and cheerfully. This read- 
justment of himself to the environment he had aban- 
doned, and the pursuits he had outgrown and un- 
learned, appears more and more to be a superb 
feature in the fisherman. It is the more note- 
worthy because it marks a feature of character that 
is apt to be so imperfectly present in us and yet a 
feature so essential to everything like persistency of 
living and permanency of results. 

It is certainly the case that in this generation of 
stir and excitement we are coming to depend a good 



I GO A-FISHING. 181 

deal, for our good behavior and our beneficent deal- 
ing, upon adventitious impulse and extraneous 
pressure. A man is something of a curiosity now 
who does his duty and keeps doing it, and follows 
that method up year after year with nothing to hold 
him to it but the moral sense on his part that it is 
the thing for him to do — like an eight day clock 
that runs, ticks, strikes and keeps time at the swing 
of its own pendulum and the pull of its own weights. 
A man went up to his reward from this church 
three or four weeks ago, that had been doing that 
thing for thirty years, and we are not even yet re- 
covered altogether from the bewilderment produced 
by so phenomenal a life. 

Children are encouraged to expect that if they do 
right they will be paid for it. Adults, some of them, 
hardly have it occur to them to contribute to a con- 
fessedly good cause till they have had their interests 
wound up and their sympathies harrowed. To sit 
down at the beginning of the year and in a cool and 
at the same time generous way decide what percent- 
age of their income they will give to the Lord, and 
then stand by it until the January following, as some 
of our fathers did, is a kind of " perseverance of the 
saints "that I am afraid is to a considerable degree 
historic. There is a certain quota in every commu- 
nity and in every church that will take up a duty 
and go along with it, with no expectation of waiting 
to have their interest periodically quickened, or their 



182 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

enthusiasm put monthly in the coals and the bellows 
pumped upon it ; but as to the rest, men and 
women, what they need as much as anything is a re- 
vival of consecutive fidelity, such that when they 
say they will do a thing, will do it and keep doing it ; 
say they will help to father or mother an enterprise, 
will do it, and keep on doing it with enough sturdiness 
of purpose and momentum of character in them- 
selves to hold them to it, even if enthusiasm does 
fluctuate and outward constraint work with varying 
tension. 

Two points more in a word : Peter was, in part, 
able to go back in a cheerful way to his humdrum 
fisherman life and get along without his Lord, be- 
cause of what the Lord while still with him had 
been to him and done for him. Just because he had 
been so much to Peter, Peter was the better able to 
do without him. And that exactly is the best thing 
that blessings in general can do for us — qualify us to 
dispense with them ; like the support upon which a 
young tree reclines which fulfills its office by making 
the tree independent of its support. Almost nine 
years ago it was said to you that Dr. Adams had 
done so much for this church that he was not indis- 
pensable any longer. Peter could cheerily draw the 
nets again upon the sea because of the new re- 
sources of strength and courage that had been de- 
veloped in intercourse with his Lord upon the land. 
Many a son and daughter of you know what it is to 



I GO A- FISHING. 183 

be able to stand up strong and self-reliant, after 
father and mother have gone, by virtue of the en- 
richment and invigoration which they produced in 
you while still with you. I have in my mind now 
the case of a bereft mother who certainly is able in 
part to survive the death of her son because of the 
manly fiber wrought in her by his chivalrous person- 
ality so long as the precious intimacies of the home 
life were still vouchsafed them. Any finite thing 
that we cannot do without is either a poor thing, or 
has not rendered to us its complete service. 

But, in fine, as we have found in our morning's 
chapter from St. John, the curtain which had fallen 
is lifted again ; the Lord who had withdrawn himself 
from the view of Peter reappears to him amid 
the tasteless endeavors of the toilsome sea, and back 
in the old humdrum life of a fisherman the divine 
voice reaches him, the divine presence greets him, 
and standing up upon the beach the Lord speaks to 
him ordaining words that set him apart forever to a 
wider, higher life and a grander ministry. Such is 
the benediction which rests upon walking in the 
twilight. Such is the way in which the Lord quietly 
teaches us that if we lose him in our great hopes and 
our large expectations there is no surer way of re- 
covering him than to step down from our high estate 
upon a simple pathway of everyday duties done 
faithfully, patiently and as cheerfully as we can. 
To those of you who are in sorrow, to whom old 



184 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

places and scenes and duties have lost their savor, I 
pray you to keep near the example of our poor fish- 
erman ; adjust yourself to the altered circumstances, 
take up again the old life, and may its lonesome in- 
conspicuous duties done patiently prove to you like- 
wise an avenue along which shall reach you the pres- 
ence and the greeting of the Lord. 



XIII 



Hoiv Much, then, is a Man Better than a Sheep ! — 
Mattheiv xii:12. 

OT a question, although our version marks it so. 
Exclamation rather. The context requires 
that, and it is so punctuated in the New Revision. 

This feature of the verse needs notice. These are 
the Lord's words, and exclamation is rare with him 
in the extreme. The reason is not far to seek. Our 
exclamations indicate that we are ourselves over- 
whelmed with the thing we are attempting to tell, 
which as a rule the Lord is not. It is one of the 
tokens of his divineness that he can say great things 
without himself becoming perturbed, or his sentences 
made nervous. We are soon iieated when we at- 
tempt to tell a great matter and our phrases creak 
under the weight we lay upon them. We are less 
than the load we lift and so are bent under it. Not 
so the Lord, usually. Which makes it all the more 
to be remarked that in our verse his mind does seem 
to be struggling with its own thoughts, and his words 

(185) 



186 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

restive under the tax put upon them. All of which 
throws a side-light on the far-reaching fact involved, 
and only adds more of embarrassment to us in our 
attempts to approach to it. 

u How much, then, is a man better than a sheep!" 
Our reading of this exclamation is not appreciative 
till we realize that in it the Son of Man was not pro- 
pounding a theory but uncovering an experience. 
He is hinting here at what he knew. It is man that 
is speaking. " He knew what was in man " — was con- 
scious of himself; we are not. I do not know 
what we should say if we could understand all that 
it means to be man. Almost every one probably 
has times when he stands in awe of himself. Christ 
utters no word anywhere that cheapens man. He 
exhorts to humility, but humility is a symptom o( 
dignity — its aroma. The sheep does not kneel. 
The Lord knelt. Christ prayed — felt upon him the 
pressure of the overshadowing. Humility is great- 
ness seen along its nether edge. 

I am not afraid to eulogize man. Conceit is one 
thing; sense of worth a distinct thing. The two 
take cognizance of different matters. My conceit 
occupies itself with what I have that is different 
from others ; my sense of worth occupies itself with 
what I am in common with others. Conceit, there- 
fore, separates men, while just sense of worth only 
draws them more closely together. Hence where 
there is the largest self-respect there will be always 



HOW MUCH IS A MAN, ETC. 187 

the largest and gentlest respect for other people. 
Once in a while we are a surprise to ourselves ; are 
stirred at times by what we seem to get upon the 
track of when we take deep, quiet counsel with our 
own hearts. We appear to be upon the edge of some- 
thing. Every soul has what it calls its grand mo- 
ments. A sort of refraction appears for an instant 
to throw above our horizon lights that are not yet 
risen. The deeper our descent the higher our 
rise. Here, as in astronomy, " up " and " down " are 
more a difference of standpoint than of fact. " Com- 
mune with your own heart and be still," said David. 
Thorough entrance into ourselves is at the same 
time a reverent drawing nigh unto God. The heart 
is the primitive temple, the first holy of holies. 
Coming to himself was the prodigal's first step toward 
coming to his father. At the bottom of the heart 
man and God meet and mingle. Consciousness of 
self, deepened and prolonged, slips into consciousness 
of God as naturally as dawn ripens into day. It was 
when the storm and the earthquake were by, and 
Elijah's face was wrapped in his mantle and his heart 
closeted in still conference with itself that the Lord's 
voice became evident to him saying, " What doest 
thou here, Elijah?" That one consciousness holds 
both God and man in a single commingled revelation 
is a long chapter in the lesson of man's meaning and 
dignity that you may better be left to think out in 
detail for yourselves. 



188 THREE GATES ON A SIDE, 

We shall suffer more from laying upon ourselves 
too low an estimate than one that is too high, if in- 
deed overestimation be possible. Man is as much of 
a mystery as God is. Theology and psychology are 
sisters. To think meanly of ourselves is a long step 
towards becoming mean. Crushing a man's self-re- 
spect is pretty nearly the same thing as crushing the 
man. I know, there is the example of the publican, 
self-condemnatory, as was meet ; smiting upon his 
breast ; would not lift up so much as his eyes unto 
heaven and saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. 
Yes, only we want to take it for all that it means. 
To me it is one of the most superb exhibits of human 
magnificence on record. A miserable sinner, and yet 
addressing God Almighty in the imperative mood. 
Sunken in crime of some kind and still with such a 
sense of worth as emboldened him to pray, and as 
gave him courage to expect that God still esteemed 
him enough to notice his prayer, attend to it and 
give him what he asked. So worthless that he 
needed to pray ; so precious that it was of some use 
to pray.. Men's estimate of God will maintain a cer- 
tain proportion with their estimate of themselves. 
Even shadows keep a certain ratio with the objects 
that cast them. Christianity gives us a deepened 
sense of human worth, and through that deepened 
sense of human worth we reach a higher sense of 
God's worth, and theology is bound to expand along 
the brightening lines of the human self-conscious- 



HOW MUCH IS A MAN, ETC. 189 

ness ; and the Gospel and humanity play backward 
and forward upon one another, like the sun which 
brightens the eye so that it can see the sun ; like the 
stars which wake up the eye so that it can find 
more of the stars. 

Even sin, too, has about it something that in this 
matter is pleasantly suggestive. It is better to be a 
man that sins than a sheep that can't. A man's 
moral corruption is index of the native moral gran- 
deur of the man ; just as the wealth of weeds in a field 
equally with the wealth of wheat in the same field 
measures the potency and richness of the soil. The 
strength of the spring can be calculated as well by 
the distance which the pendulum swings to the left 
of the perpendicular as by the distance of its swing 
to the right. There is the' same degree of sinfulness 
in a sin as there is of personal worth in the man that 
commits it. Here, too, the shadow keeps a ratio 
with the object that casts it, and the blackness of 
the shadow will vary with the brightness of the sun- 
shine that gets excluded. 

A man can be only as devilish actually as he is 
saintly potentially. We should infer that Satan 
was created to be an angel of light even if we had 
not been told it. Only the organic can putrefy, not 
the inorganic. Tarnish is correlative only with 
luster and stain with whiteness. Hence all that 
Scripture so emphatically says of man's sinfulness is 
at the same time a tacit tribute to his native worth ; 



190 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

and we can appreciate the import of a saving Gos- 
pel only in the degree in which we first appreciate 
the height from which man has fallen as well as the 
depth to which he has fallen. It is important that 
men should be saved because there is so much for 
them to be saved to as well as so much for them to 
be saved from. 

There is in man also a certain power to transcend 
limitations that gives him just a flavor of infinitude. 
The spirit chafes under restraints ; has a sense con- 
tinually of something outside that it has not yet 
gotten to ; makes for itself a larger and larger world ; 
stretches itself back in memory and forward in sur- 
mise. We are like the bird in the cage that is kept 
inside the bars, but lives in continuous communica- 
tion with the air and light without, as though ani- 
mated still with a sense of freedom that has been 
forgotten. The Shinarites built into the air. The 
giants piled Ossa on Pelion. Everything is to us 
small because there is a larger ; everything partial 
because there is a whole. Assurance continually 
runs ahead of verification. Everything that gets in 
our way is felt by us almost as an impropriety and 
an indignity. 

In one way the earth is larger than we, in others 
it is a great deal smaller. It is compelled to loan it- 
self to our service. Mind masters matter. We tame 
and harness the forces of nature and put them to 
our work. The sea that separates the continents is 



HOW MUCH IS A MAN, ETC. 191 

made over into a highway to connect them. We 
play off the energies of nature upon each other and 
set the mountain torrent to boring a roadway 
through the very mountain it flows off from. We 
rub out distance and talk through the air to Chicago, 
and tie our letters to the lightning and post them 
under the sea to London, Constantinople and Cal- 
cutta. Pent in the body we are, and yet domiciled 
in all the earth ; a sort of adumbration of omni- 
presence. 

In the same way thought gets into the sky, slips 
around upon the ocean of space from star to star as 
easily as a birch canoe among the islands of any 
mundane archipelago ; finds out what has been 
transpiring in- the heavens for a million years ; fixes 
latitudes and longitudes of suns a thousand years 
away as the light flies ; learns their secrets, weighs 
them, measures them, exacts from them their biog- 
raphy and their kinships ; reads in the star-beams 
the story of stellar composition ; finds the unity 
that pervades the whole ; translates the phenomena 
of the heavens into terms of terrestrial event ; gets at 
the language in which all the worlds unconsciously 
think, the lines along which they instinctively act. 
It is grander to think a world than to be a world. 
To be able to conceive of a universe is fraught with 
richer sublimity than to be a universe. We rejoice 
in the great created world. It pleased God when 
he had made it, and it pleases us because our tastes 



192 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

are like his. We can discover the laws which work 
in it. A natural law is a divine thought, In de- 
tectingand threading those laws, then, we are follow- 
ing where God's mind has gone on before. Mind 
can construe only what mind constructs, and only 
when the mind that construes matches the mind 
that constructs. In this way nature is a mirror that 
shows both God's face and our own ; and scientific 
truth is only religious truth secularly conceived. 

It is rather in the line of this to say besides that we 
are persuaded how great a thing it is to be man, 
by observing the ease with which man can receive a 
divine revelation. If we are to save the idea of rev- 
elation in its integrity, it must be either by the dig- 
nification of man or the belittlement of God.. The 
two, man and God, will have by some means to be 
understood as standing to one another within intelli- 
gent reach. We shall be obliged either to be guilty 
of anthropomorphism and conceive of God as only a 
huge-proportioned man, or we shall be driven to the 
alternative necessity of conceiving of man under the 
figure of a little God, what Cicero calls " a mortal 
God ;" if you please, a son of God, with all that that 
word son can reasonably import. Such belief as we 
have in a divine revelation is a confession of faith on 
our part that God's thought can in certain cases be 
translated into the terms of man's thought without 
God's thought parting with any of its essential 
truthfulness. 



HOW MUCH IS A MAN, ETC. 193 

For example, when we are divinely told, " Blessed 
are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy/' if that 
is revelation, if there is any revealment in it, we 
shall have to understand that the thought which is 
started in our minds by that expression answers 
truthfully to the thought in God's mind which occa- 
sioned that expression. There is risk in saying 
that a truth is adapted to our minds— that a divine 
truth is taken and then adjusted to our finite powers- 
of apprehension. It is an easy thing to say but a 
mischievous one, and spoils everything in the revela- 
tion-idea that is worth saving. A truth is not a 
thing that can be adjusted. You cannot adjust a 
key to a lock without changing the key. Nor can 
you adjust a truth to the mind without changing the 
truth, and truth changed ceases to be truth. So 
that if the truth fits into the wards of my mind as 
the key does into those of the lock, it is not because 
the truth has been reshaped or reduced till it fits my 
mind, but because my mind is so constructed as to 
receive the truth without any such reshaping or re- 
duction ; it is because my mind is so in the image of 
God's mind and so duplicates it that there is between 
them an essential identity in operation and appre- 
ciation. It is not truth to me except to the degree 
in which I see it and feel it exactly as God sees it 
and feels it. There is no more truth in a truth in- 
correctly apprehended than there is in a lie correctly 
apprehended. 



194 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

All of which possesses the fact of a real divine rev- 
elation with intensest interest. The doctrine of a bona 
fide revelation from God consists with only one or 
the other of two alternatives : either that Godhood 
is in that particular a superior order of manhood, or 
that manhood is in that particular an inferior-order 
of Godhood. That God's mind and my own can to 
a degree actually appreciate the same truths estab- 
lishes between him and myself so far forth relations 
most immediate and intimate ; just as the child to 
the degree in which he appreciates his father's wond 
is the duplicate of his father, whether you prefer to 
call manhood a superior order of childhood, or 
childhood an inferior order of manhood. Now all 
of this is a matter for reflection during our reading 
of God's Word. As our minds slide along the lines 
there drawn for them, we shall need often to recall 
the fact that precisely these truths God has thought 
over before us ; that our minds are traveling in the 
path his mind has worn. All of this will give to us 
a thrilling experience of his nearness to us, and of 
ours to him, quicken in us a keen sense of the favors 
with which he has honored us, the dignity with 
which we are natively endowed. 

Still it is not the fact that there can be a divine 
revelation so much as it is what that divine revela- 
tion contains that does most to convince us of the 
> 

dignity inherent in our nature. The central object 
of Scripture is the Cross, and that Cross proves two 



HOW MUCH IS A MA IV, ETC. 195 

things — God's hatred of sin and God's esteem for 
the sinner, and God's esteem exactly matches man's 
worth. Whoever cheapens man belittles the Cross, 
and makes crucifixion a waste of divine blood. 
Man's worth explains redemption, not redemption 
man's worth. Calvary is man's eulogy written by 
God in characters of his own life-crimson. We could 
reach a just estimate of man if once we could com- 
prehend what it denotes for God really to be grieved 
and to suffer on our account. There is a logic in re- 
demption which gets badly strained by man's indis- 
criminate self-derogation. 

There are two ways of saving the logic : one is by 
making Christ less than divine ; the other is by making 
man more than what Watts in his familiar hymn calls a 
" worm." We can understand how God in his infini- 
tude can take care of us. He takes care as well of 
the sheep and the sparrows. That gives us little 
basis of inference. No expense is involved. But 
when we come to the matter of God's enduring pain 
on our account we are on different ground and be- 
neath a different sky. This matter of God's heart- 
ache it is next to impossible for us really to get under 
the power of. If we but could, it would set so many 
things right with us both in doctrine and life. We 
are taxed and tortured by the effort to conceive how 
God ever could lovingly impoverish himself for the 
sake of man that he had at one time made out of 
nothing. It sets us wondering whether that is really 



196 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

a fair account of the matter, whether we are the 
product of mere manufacture, whether immortality 
forward of us has not in some way its anterior com- 
plement. The Bible is full of genealogy. A man's 
age cannot be with nice precision stated. The son 
is in a deep sense his father prolonged. " Who was 
the son of Seth, who was the son of Adam, who was 
the Son of God." History is a long thing; so is 
life. Was there, then, a time when the human 
spirit began to be? Who was the son of Adam, who 
was the son of God. Sonship is a profound matter. 
Mystery lies close about us. " The dust shall return 
to the earth as it was, and the spirit to God who 
gave it." We must have the courage to glance out 
sometimes into new avenues of thought, even if we 
have not the hardihood to tread those avenues to 
their issue. 

" The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 

And cometh from afar; 
Not in entire forgetfulness, 
And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
From God who is our home." 

Which is not inspired, perhaps, but slips easily into 
our thought in the wake of that quotation from 
Ecclesiastes — "And the spirit shall return unto God 
who gave it." 

And the Calvary sorrow of God has a farther reach 



HO W MUCH IS A MAN, ETC. 197 

of effect in this respect when it is contemplated by 
us as the instant betrayal of a permanent grief. 
The transaction about and upon the cross is the 
coming into history of redemptive suffering that lies 
both backward and forward of the Man of Nazareth. 
It is the breaking into view over Jerusalem of a brief 
patch of the same blue that behind the clouds com- 
passes the whole canopy of the sky from horizon to 
horizon. It is the temporal display of God's eternal 
heartache for his children. And to calculate our 
own meaning we should have to take the compass of 
such a sorrow and render it into terms of human 
value, for we are sure that the regard of the heavenly 
Father never falls out of equipoise with the worth 
of the heavenly child. With God is no mistaken 
affection and no blundering esteem. It is this which 
gives daily a new interest .to the Scriptures of the 
Old Testament. It is strewn with hints of the way 
in which God was exercising himself in ripening his 
scheme of redemption. It shows how close, all the 
way along, we have been lying to God's earnest 
thought and grieved regard. 

If we will let this side-light fall upon these old 
parts of the Bible I do not see how our interest in its 
pages can ever weary or falter. It is an old record ; 
but it is an old record of to-day's heavenly Father. 
It is like the uplift of the ancient mountains which 
still give us fresh hints of the mystic grandeur of 



198 THREE GATES ON A SIDE, 

the globe from which they protrude. It is like the 
beaming of the old stars which still flash upon us 
revelations of the celestial vault in which they 
cluster. It is all of it a continuous variation upon 
the theme set down for us in the prophecy of Isaiah : 
"In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel 
of his presence saved them ; in his love and in his 
pity he redeemed them ; and he bare them and 
carried them all the days of old." And when we 
prolong our backward view past Bethlehem not only 
and the prophets, but past Sinai and Egypt and the 
Great River and the Flood and Eden and the first 
Dawn, the last thing the eye meets down the 
aisle of the unrecorded ages is still the cross, and " the 
Lamb slain before the foundation of the world." In 
that sadly sublime suggestion, away out at the last 
end of Scripture, we can feel more than we can think. 
But our heart keeps coming back to it. " The Lamb 
slain before the foundation of the world;" it touches 
us at a point within where consciousness has hardly 
reached yet. There is in it a reservoir of meaning that 
keeps all the lowlands of Scripture in continuous inun- 
dation. Before the world was founded we were close 
to God's thought, and he suffered for us already with 
anticipative suffering. The cross was in the air be- 
fore Zion had been reared or Golgotha fashioned. 

What is man ! At the impulse of an infinite suf- 
fering and in the fellowship of an eternal cross we 



HOW MUCH IS A MAN, ETC. 199 

are prepared to allow to thought widest range and 
to imagination freest flight. "What is man," O 
God ! " that Thou art mindful of him and the son 
of man that THOU visitest him ! " 



XIV 

»w *- ^ w 

"Whereby Are Given Unto Us Exceeding Great 
and Precious Promises, that by these Te Might 
be Partakers of the Divine Nature." — 2 Peter 
i: 4. 

"PARTAKERS of the divine nature"— that is 
W enough for a text. I do not know how much 
we can make out of it, but God grant that it may 
make something out of us. It is waste of time now 
to take the text and spin it out into fine threads. 
You are certain to spoil a cocoon in the process of 
working it over into skein-silk. " Partakers of the di- 
vine nature ! " Never mind what the Greek of it is. 
That is the English of it, and English-speaking peo- 
ple will have to be saved by an English-speaking Gos- 
pel. Never mind what Alf ord, Lightf oot, or the school- 
men think or have written about it. There is some- 
thing great here, and we want to leave it great. Some 
things have to be minced in order to reduce to use. 
Corn must be ground before it can become meal and 
make bread. But the mountains must be let alone. 
A wide, thrilling landscape wants no comment but a 
warm eye, no picture-frame but the sky. 

(200) 



PARTAKERS OF DIVINE NATURE. 201 

Language has a pretty hard stint when it tries to 
tell us the great things of the Gospel Words though 
written by a pen dipped in fire and manipulated by a 
Spirit-anointed Evangelist, cannot show us wide mat- 
ters when we are looking with narrow eyes. He that 
hath ears to hear let him hear. He that hath eyes 
to see let him see. Words do not show us things, 
they tell us where to look for them. This Gospel 
even does not give us the heavens, but it is a God- 
wrought telescope, at the eye piece of which we can 
kneel down and look up into the heavens. Chris- 
tianity is to me what I see in the heavens when look- 
ing through this telescope. When I am blind I will 
take some one's else description of the celestial field 
and the constellations that blossom along its furrows ; 
but till then give me God's telescope and God's stars, 
and away with your pictures, your charts and your 
diagrams. 

"Partakers of the divine nature ! " Our look, then, 
this morning is at something that needs a long sweep 
of the eye. Habits of microscopic inspection will be 
fatal to all attempts at a range so remote and cloud- 
piercing. Men who spend nine-tenths of their time 
polishing needles and counting the lenses in a fly's 
eye will not accomplish much the other tenth trying 
to interpret the handwriting of God on the sky. 
Small looking makes small seeing, and myopia, when 
so induced, wipes out the superlative splendors both 
of a man's astronomical and his spiritual firmament. 



202 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

Our verse will at least give aim to our vision, and 
although it may lie away out like a patch of star- 
mist in the untraveled spaces, yet perhaps it will 
grow upon our eye and take a little more shape be- 
fore our eye, although even unresolved, and indeed 
unresolvable star mist, floating in the cosmic dis- 
tances, is a million times fuller of thrill than the same 
mist condensed into drops, and represented by ink- 
spatters in white on your study-table. 

" Partakers of the divine nature," which is to say 
taking part in the divine nature. Not simply like 
God, but in a way ^ar^-holders in him; something 
possibly as the .waves of the sea are partakers in the 
sea; something it may be as the leaves of a tree share 
in the life of the tree. Not that we attach great value 
to such parables save as they give the thought an up- 
ward incline. We are not afraid of widening out the 
area of our humanity along the line of its upward 
frontier. It is childish for one who happens to know 
a little more than his neighbor to boast of his supe- 
riority to his neighbor; but it is another thing for a 
man to be intelligently and gratifiedly conscious of 
that in himself which he has in common with his 
neighbor, and in common with all his neighbors. It 
is the difference between self-conceit and self-respect. 
The little differences between us make us conceited ; 
the wide and profound fundamentals of our common 
nature are the grounds of our self-respecting. 

Man differs in one very peculiar regard from the 



PARTAKERS OF DIVINE NATURE. 203 

brute; not only in moving in a higher range of life 
and experience, but in not being tethered to any 
fixed condition. The brute is a brute, and always a 
brute. Improve your dog, and he will still be brutal. 
Debase your dog, and he will still be brutal, and 
evince no symptoms of dropping to a lower grade of 
being. However miserable he may be as a dog, he 
will still be a perfect dog, and give no indication of 
degenerating to the inferior nature of a vegetable or 
a mineral. The dog is tied to his conditions ; he can 
neither apostatize from caninity, nor be trained nor 
recreated into humanity. He stays where he is put. 
Once a dog, always a dog ! 

On the contrary, there is a just sense in which you 
can say of humanity, that it is not so much a condi- 
tion, as it is a position of poise between two alterna- 
tive conditions. It is like standing at the half-way 
point on the Gemmi Pass in Switzerland. You look 
down to the profound depths beneath you, or you 
turn and look up to the superb heights above you, 
but you are not going to stop there, nor to live there. 
There is no house at the spot. It is not a place to 
remain, but a place from which to look off. You are 
either on your way down the Pass to Leuker-Bad, or 
you are on your way up the Pass to the Wild-striibel ; 
it is merely a position of poise between two alterna- 
tive destinations. 

A good deal of the same thing we can say about 
our humanity, and by our humanity I mean the gen- 



204 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

eral complex of powers and possibilities that we bring 
with us into our life here. We have not so much a 
sense of fixity, as we have presentiment of destiny. 
We are at a looking-off place. There are no conven- 
iences for remaining where we are. The longer we 
wait, the more distinctly we feel that we must go. 
Conflicting impulses may draw us both ways, but that 
cannot continue indefinitely. We shall have to 
choose between the two, and follow our choice. 
Every man knows how near he is to being a brute ; 
and every man knows how near he is to the alterna- 
tive destiny. A frontier line touches both countries. 
Humanity is a kind of water-shed, off from which the 
rivers all flow, and flow to opposite points of the 
compass We look down as far as we can, and call 
the indistinguishable bottom hell; we look up as 
high as we can, and call the indistinguishable sum- 
mit heaven. Hell is humanity slipped down the Pass 
till it has become bestial. Heaven is humanity 
climbed up the Pass till it attains to the divine. That 
is the geography of the three worlds. All written re- 
ligions have portrayed it, because every human heart 
has felt itself in transitu, and has had a sense of alter- 
native destinies. I address myself in this, not to 
your interpretation of Scripture, but to your inter- 
pretation of your own minds. Scripture is written on 
a ruled page, and the lines to which even the inspired 
pen conforms itself, are such as are first laid down in 
the general consciousness of the race. 



PARTAKERS OF DIVINE NATURE. 205 

Ye are partakers of the divine nature. Our thought 
to-day is particularly up the Pass, not down. There 
is more danger in a theology that differences man 
from God than in one which assimilates man to God. 
There is as a rule, more quickening stimulus in the 
prospect of victory than there is in the danger of de- 
feat. Few men ever become great through fear of 
remaining small. There is more incentive in trying 
to get to the top of the class than in trying to keep 
away from the bottom of it. 

The Hebrew economy, as recorded for us in the 
Old Testament Scriptures, plays indeed an important 
part in the history of the Christian idea. But in 
those old times it was the ineffable holiness and the 
inaccessible greatness of God that was steadily ad- 
vertised. Men were not encouraged to draw nigh 
unto God. All the arrangements of the Hebrew sys- 
tem discouraged everything of the kind. All the 
dramatic accompaniments of divine manifestation (as 
the giving of the law) were suggestive of nothing so 
much as of the unconquerable distance that sepa- 
rated between God and his people. The provisional 
purpose in all this it would not be difficult to state; 
but the fact that just now concerns us, is that so long 
as this relation of things lasted, men never began to 
become Go&~like. There is no incentive to the effort 
to draw nigh to one of whom the only thought we 
have is that he is absolutely unapproachable ; or to 
become like one of whom the chief thing we have 



206 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

been told, is that he is absolutely inimitable. In this 
respect, as well as in some others, the New Testa- 
ment marks a distinct advance in the history of reli- 
gious unfolding. Having been taught for thousands 
of years that God is unspeakably holy, and ineffably 
high and lifted up, Christ comes and says, "But then 
that need not hinder your coming close to him, and 
holding fellowship with him. ,, There is a great deal 
in having a prospect ; and when Christ came and gave 
men a prospect, and taught them that there was no 
absurdity and no profanity in their seeking after God 
withal he was so holy, and walking with him withal 
he was a heaven-enthroned God, they became great 
enough for the act, and in the act were made like him. 
We must not abate (I am afraid we do to a certain 
extent), but we ought not to abate the old Hebrew 
habit of celebrating the glory and majesty of God. 
We enfeeble our religious life and pauperize our de- 
vout loyalties when we embrace with our reverent 
regards only those divine properties that scatter 
through the fine-meshed sieve of our affections. 
Tone and strength are by this means sacrificed. It 
is the "majestic sweetness/' it is the regal loveliness 
of our God to which we are invited, to whose con- 
tacts we have admission guaranteed us, the very ef- 
fect of which contacts it is to have the communica- 
tion of his own divineness made over to us, the repro- 
duction of his own eternal spirit consummated with- 
in us. 



PARTAKERS OF DIVINE NATURE. 207 

This matter of knowing God and of being in fel- 
lowship with him is wide and wonderful. There 
are rich and startling depths of meaning contained 
in it ; and the meaning we must not be afraid of, nor 
shrink to stand by. We will look a moment in this 
direction and let come what will. 

Our philosophers object to what is, in rather a 
schoolish way, called " anthropomorphism, " that is, 
the habit of representing God as possessed of modes 
and features of being that belong to man. Now we 
do that, and so long as we continue to do that we 
must be prepared for the consequences; we must be 
prepared to confess that the human and the divine 
have that in common which makes common terms 
admissible ; that there is a point where the two ea- 
sily touch so that there is no telling where one leaves 
off and the other begins ; a point, a good many of 
them perhaps, so belonging to both, that whether 
you call them human or call them divine, will depend 
on preference and taste. This is no place to dwell on 
the metaphysics of the matter. We are only trying 
to bring our own thoughts into beat with the rhythm 
of thought as it evinces itself all the way through the 
Gospel. It comes out in the conception which the Gos- 
pel gives us of Jesus Christ. You can call him human ; 
you can call him divine: most of us call him both; 
and when we call him both and name him a divine 
man, our idea is not that part of him is one, and a 
part the other, and the two parts bound by some non- 



208 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

descript Siamese ligament, but that humanity at its 
best, and divinity under limitation, are in such way 
identical that they can justly bear either name. 

We are not trying to explain incarnation ; we are 
only trying to see what it is that we, who believe in 
incarnation, really assent to in believing it. We as- 
sent to it that divinity and humanity are to such de- 
gree identical, that the founder of our religion could 
be both inside of one homogeneous personality: 
something as you can draw two circumferences 
in such a way as to have them intersect each other, 
and a part of the contained area, therefore, belong at 
the same time to both circles. We are not attempt- 
ing to gain so clear-cut a conviction of this matter, 
that we can make a memorandum of it in our diary. 
We are simply trying to look in the right direction — 
in the direction indicated by our verse — and to let 
what hangs in the air imprint itself on our eyes in 
its own way. 

Now that God has become man (an idea familiar 
to the religions of the world elsewhere as well as in 
Christendom), now that the divine has once become 
human without ceasing to be divine, all necessary 
distinction between the two declares itself rubbed 
out. Now see what follows. If God can humanize 
the divine to the point of its becoming man, as in 
the instance of Jesus, what is to hinder him, in the 
exercise of the same Omnipotence, from deifying 
man to the point of his becoming divine? It is no 



PARTAKERS OF DIVINE NATURE. 209 

farther from the bottom of the mountain to the top 
than it is from the top to the bottom. Now that, 
my friends, as we read the Gospel, is exactly what 
the blessed spirit is trying to do with us. God became 
like us that we might become like God. He is seek- 
ing to lead us back over the same road that he came 
down. Sanctification the reverse of incarnation! 
Never mind definitions ; we are looking in the right 
direction. "Partakers of the divine nature." 

"Now are we the sons of God." It is all in that 
word "sons." There is community through identity. 
You cannot get sonship in any other way. You may 
spend a score of years fashioning marble into ex- 
pressions of your own ideals of beauty and grace, but 
those statues it would scarcely occur to you to call 
your sons and your daughters. Sonship and fellow- 
ship come only from being shareholders in one com- 
mon life. Christ was not the creature of God, but the 
Son of God, only because he and his father were one. 
The dog on the hearth-rug! The boy on his father's 
lap ! One and the same life looks from the father's 
eye into the son's eye, and from the son's eye into 
the father's eye. Mystery? There is mystery every- 
where. We are only looking at the star-mist out in 
the wide spaces. 

Of course we have made bungling work in telling 
this. Even great Paul did, and strained his sentences 
almost to the point of breaking, as when he said, " I 
live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." There is 



210 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

»more between the lines of the Bible than there is in 
the lines. We spend a good deal of time trying to 
understand what the Bible does say ; we might pro- 
fitably spend a little time every day in trying to 
understand what the Bible does not say. It is gen- 
erally the case that things are discovered by attempt- 
ing to see a little more than is visible, going out to 
the end of the longest and highest promontory and 
looking off. 

In such expressions as that just quoted from Paul, 
wherein he says, "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth 
in me," it needs no great discernment to see that he 
does not intend only to say that his life and experi- 
ence are being managed by the control of divine in- 
fluence, as a vessel is driven by the wind or thrust 
forward by the tide. To the degree in which we 
read down into the substance of the matter, we feel 
that there was that blending between himself and 
the divine Spirit, that it was all one whether he said 
he acted, or said that God acted in him. For a little 
distance frontier lines were erased. The same terri- 
tory belonged to both circles. I do not make my 
meaning clear ; my meaning is not clear to myself. 
But there is something great here, and we would 
rather see a mountain-slope afar off, than to own and 
fence a little patch of that slope, and be able to plant 
a few hills of corn upon it. 

A loyal son is governed by his father; but it is the 
best element of that loyalty, not that the son does 



PARTAKERS OF DIVINE NATURE. 211 

what the father bids him do, or makes him do, but 
that the son has his father's spirit so reproduced in 
himself, and so become a part of himself and he so a 
partaker in his father's nature, that his one act is at 
the same instant both his act and his father's act. 
And when we pray that God will control us by his 
Spirit, we certainly hardly expect that he is going 
to put his personality behind us, so as to push us 
onward ; or put his personality in front of us, so as 
to hold us backward. We would rather mean, 
would we not, that as children of his, we are bound 
in the bundle of one life with him, moving therefore 
at the impulse of energies that are ours without their 
ceasing to be his — somewhat perhaps as each sepa- 
rate storm-wave rolls in the expression of its own 
might, which is at the same time a part of the might 
of the sea ; somewhat perhaps as each separate leaf 
or branch grows green in the expression of its own 
life, which is at the same time a part of the life of 
the vine. This last is the Lord's illustration, not 
ours. Abide in me and I in you. As the branch 
cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine, 
no more can ye except ye abide in me. I in you, 
you in me. Frontier lines gone. One in each other. 
A single bundle of life, human or divine, eitlicr or 
both ; a shareholder in God ; up the Gemmi Pass 
toward the indistinguishable summit ! 



XV 

mi mi mi mi 

Wherefore, Take Unto Tou the Whole Armor of 
God That 2~e May be Able to Withstand i?i the 
Evil Day, and Having Done All, to Stand — 
Ephesians vi:18. 

UR text introduces St. Paul's description of the 
Christian armor. The foregoing verse por- 
trays with a good deal of spirit the forces of evil 
with which our life battle has to be fought ; and the 
four verses that come after specify in detail the 
equipment in which those forces are to be met and 
antagonized : viz, " Stand, therefore, having your 
loins girt about with truth and having on the 
breastplate of righteousness, and your feet shod 
with the preparation of the Gospel of peace ; above 
all taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be 
able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. 
And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of 
the spirit which is the word of God." 

That completes the Christian armament. Now, it 
would be strange if, from the general character of 
the armament, we were not able to infer something as 
to the purposes and methods of the warfare in which 



DEFENSIVE ARMOR. 213 

that armanent is to be employed. Each variety of 
battle demands its correspondent variety of weapon. 
When you are told that Krupp's guns are being 
gotten in position you understand that it is a matter 
of bombardment and long range. Musketry warfare 
is between infantry forces so disposed that each 
man becomes an easy target to his antagonist. 
"Fixed bayonets" puts us thinking upon close 
combat, and hand-to-hand scrimmage. The kind of 
weapon denotes the methods and purposes of the 
combatants. When David went forth to meet 
Goliath you easily infer, both from what he took 
and what he omitted to take, what sort of a duel it 
was that he was intending to fight with the old 
Philistine. David wore no mail, carried no shield 
and equipped himself only with a sling. Evidently 
he purposed to take the initiative, act on the offen- 
sive, be the attacking party, stand out of range 
of Goliath's weapons, and anything like defensive 
armor on his own part would be, therefore, super- 
fluous. Already, before the battle, we read David's 
methods and purposes distinctly in his equipment, 
and understand as fully at the beginning as we do 
at the end that he has nothing to do with warding 
off the blows and thrusts of his adversary, but that 
his whole mode and animus, on the contrary, is one 
of offense. 

Now, has it occurred to you to infer from St. 
Paul's description of the Christian armor anything 



214 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

as to the method and character of the Christian war- 
fare? As described in our chapter, the equipment is 
made up of six pieces — the girdle, the breastplate, 
the sandals, the shield, the helmet and only, last and 
sixth, the sword — five pieces of defensive armor to 
one piece offensive. 

Now, that is our point — five pieces defensive to 
one piece offensive ; from which we easily derive it 
as our topic for the morning that successful Christian 
warfare consists, primarily, not in destroying the evil 
or the devil, but in preventing his destroying us ; 
not in assaulting him, but in showing ourselves 
competent to keep our feet under his assaults ; that 
patience rather than aggression is our prime busi- 
ness ; and that active talents of achievement are 
only one-fifth as necessary as passive graces of en- 
durance. 

If we are much at home with our hearts we are 
aware that not to be defeated is already a good deal 
of a victory, and that to do no more than to stand 
our ground and hold our own requires a moral 
genius of a very stubborn and heroic and military 
cast. The first impulse of heroism is in the direc- 
tion of aggression — driving the enemy back, ad- 
vancing our own lines of fortification, widening our 
own area of occupation. In general, fighting means 
with us, first of all, seizing a sword and brandishing 
it or a musket and firing it. That was what it 
meant to Peter back at our Lord's betrayal. Peter 



DEFENSIVE ARMOR. 215 

was brave with the sword, but it is not so hard to be 
brave with the sword as it is to stand quietly in the 
face of the enemy and be brave underneath the 
shield and the helmet. Peter was courageous 
enough to try to drive back the enemy, but a few 
hours later he was not courageous enough to stand 
his ground while the enemy tried to drive him 
back ; and he went out and wept bitterly to think 
how little of a hero, with all his sword-brandishing, he 
really was. He was brave enough to thrust, but 
hadn't the courage simply to stand and parry ; could 
do, but could not endure ; could act, but could not 
bear. 

Simply enduring is our hardest work and our 
toughest fight. And this is strongly expressed and 
illustrated in all our Lord's life and work and precept. 
In every respect Jesus Christ contradicts the cur- 
rent drift of opinion and approbation. He was a 
sad and continuous disappointment to his disciples, 
and one of whom even now many of his followers 
are not altogether proud. He does not fall in 
with popular prepossessions. He has not that in 
him which answers to what we applaud in conspic- 
uous men of our own times. The more like Jesus a 
man or woman may be to-day the less chance he 
would stand of celebrity. Were he to reappear in 
New York, he would suffer substantially the same 
treatment he received in Jerusalem. There is some 
uncertainty as to what kind of reception would be 



216 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

accorded him even by the churches. If we knew 
that it was Jesus perhaps we should throng around 
him ; but, not knowing that it was he, if he 
taught the same doctrine of meekness that he used 
to teach, and lived the same life of unaggressive 
endurance and unresisting patience that he used to 
live, he would not count for much — not with us. 

I doubt if any ambitious congregation in this city 
would call him to their pulpit, or if many residences 
along our avenues would be opened to him in hospi- 
tality. He did not fulfill the American idea of smart- 
ness ; he did not " get on in the world. " He sim- 
ply stood and took what was given him ; bore what 
was laid upon him. That was his victory. His 
greatest act was in letting himself be unresistingly 
taken and crucified. He did nothing that contem- 
porary peoples heard anything about or that con- 
temporary history made any note of. The thing 
that distinguishes him is not that he did anything 
with the devil, but that he did not let the devil do 
anything with him. At the end of thirty-three 
years he said : " The prince of this world hath 
nothing in me," no point at which he can trip me, 
no place in me at which my strength is not matched 
to his assaults. We estimate men according to the 
amount of pressure which they can exert; Christ 
estimates himself according to the amount of pres- 
sure which he can sustain. " Who, when he was 
reviled, reviled not again ; when he suffered, he 



DEFENSIVE ARMOR. 217 

threatened not/' " He was oppressed and he was 
afflicted; yet he opened not his mouth. He 
is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep 
before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his 
mouth. " 

So that if we take our cue from him it will be 
quite as pertinent to ask — not how big a thing can 
I do without breaking, but how heavy a burden can 
I bear without crushing. How much in the shape 
of trial, disappointment, insinuating temptation, 
small provocation, little stinging exasperation can I 
suffer and still be kept quiet, gentle and patient 
under it all? That is not the popular standard of 
estimate, and it is occasion of considerable dishearten- 
ment sometimes to reflect how small a way we 
have gone yet in adopting into practical usage 
Christ's own criterion of judgment. We " believe 
in Christ," and we are, I suppose, measurably sincere 
in saying it ; but what is this " belief," and what 
does it comprise ? We " believe in Christ," but is 
it not the fact with us that we do not quite believe 
in any overwhelming way in men that are like him ? 
We do not love most the things which he loved most, 
nor feel nor evince supreme regard for the things 
which he prized and honored above anything else. 

We have been hearing in these days a deal about 
the " New Theology " and about the " readjust- 
ment " of our doctrinal symbols. I do not so 
much care whether it is new theology or old theol- 



218 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

ogy ; whether it is readjusted theology or unadjusted 
theology, or no theology at all. Both as relates to 
myself and to my congregation I am a good deal 
less concerned about heresy in doctrinal opinions 
than I am about heresy in practical everyday aims 
and admirations, and there is no kind of revival for 
which we need more fervently to pray than a revi- 
val that shall give us readjusted affections, so that 
we shall love the things which the Lord loved, and 
estimate most highly the things which he estimated 
most highly, and prize the people about us accord- 
ing to the criteria that dominated his judgments, 
and adopt into our own daily practical life the aims 
and the principles that ruled his life. 

If you will think of it, the Lord did not do a great 
deal while he was on the earth. His ministry lasted 
only about three years, and even during that time 
he went about his business in a very leisurely and 
deliberate way. A good many of you do more in 
one day than he did in a week. Alexander the 
Great died at just about the age of Jesus, thirty-three, 
and if you estimate lives by the public exhibition 
that they make of themselves and the evident and 
instant results that they afford and the palpable effect 
that they put forth, Alexander did far more in his 
thirty-three years than the Lord did in his, and the 
record of his doings makes a more voluminous and 
more readable history ; and we shall never under- 
stand the Lord's life, nor read its record apprecia- 



DEFENSIVE ARMOR. 219 

tively till we have learned that to endure patiently 
is greater and harder and holier than to do magnifi- 
cently. 

Entrance into the kingdom is through the gate- 
way of our power to bear, and not of our power to 
achieve. There occurs in the first chapter of the 
Revelations a singular expression — one of many 
instances in which Scripture with seeming delight 
puts as close together as possible words that appear 
almost to contradict one another. It is in the 
ninth verse of the first chapter of Revelations where 
John says : " I am your companion in tribulation, 
and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ. " 
u Kingdom and patience, of Jesus Christ" — words that 
seem first off to neutralize each other. As we look 
at it, it is not the king but the subject that has to 
exercise the patience. Holding up our common 
notions in front of Christianity is like suspending 
printed words before a mirror — they all come back 
into our eye reversed. John seems to say that it 
was exactly in the superlativeness of his endurance 
that Christ's true kingliness existed and demonstra- 
ted itself, and that it is by our possession of the 
same genius of patience that we become members in 
his kingdom. 

This certainly is true — which we can all under- 
stand — that it requires more holiness and more 
interior vigor simply to keep quiet under tempta- 
tion or any kind of provocation, than it does to 



220 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

project ourselves into some form of pronounced 
and conspicuous activity. Suffering costs more 
grace than acting. Action stimulates activity. 
Exertion gives us a sense of power. The greater 
the thing we do the more conscious we become of 
faculty. We are stimulated sometimes by our own 
deeds just as orators are inspired by their own elo- 
quence. When great Christian undertakings are 
achieved, what passes as the aid and stimulus of the 
Holy Spirit may be only the intoxication due to 
the effervescence of our own spirits. A great enter- 
prize thrills our powers of enterprize, so that they 
are at their best. An extraordinary man can there- 
fore do more easily an extraordinary thing than an 
ordinary man can do an ordinary thing. 

But, on the contrary, simple endurance, standing 
still under a load that is almost heavier than you 
can sustain, there is in that no flavor or suggestion 
of inspiration. Suffering does not nerve a man to 
endure suffering. There is in it no element of 
momentum. It reduces simply to a bare matter of 
staying power. As in the shipwreck described in 
the Acts, it becomes a question of casting out the 
anchors and simply waiting for the morning — hold- 
ing on till daylight. 

St. Paul moved hither and thither through Asia 
and Europe in his magnificent missionary tours, and 
we presume that he was prayerful through them all 
and sought unto God for his wisdom and grace ; but, 



DEFENSIVE ARMOR. 221 

being human, he was doubtless kept moving not only 
by the divine grace, but also by his own stimulated 
faculties of action, the vastness of his work and the 
novelties of the experience into which his enterprize 
ushered him. But the time when preeminently we 
do find St. Paul on his knees, seeking unto God in 
long and importunate prayer, was not when he had 
a great sermon to preach or a long epistle to write, 
or a great journey to make, but when he had a little 
miserable, pricking, stinging thorn in the flesh to 
bear. There was nothing that could exactly be 
called exhilarating in that. It cut into the nerve, 
but could hardly be said to make nerve. 

Besides that, our actions issuing in, palapable 
effects, remind us that we are good for something. 
I suppose that in this feeling of not being any longer 
of any account lies one of the saddest experiences 
of old age. Laid by ; buried but not interred. The 
desire which the aged, just as their juniors, have, to 
do something, may spring in part from a wish to be 
of benefit to somebody, or of service to the cause of 
the Master, but inexplicably bound up with these 
motives is the pleasure of seeing ourselves dupli- 
cated, advertized in our results, as people glance at 
their own portrait on the wall, or read interestedly 
their own name in print. Action then has this to 
facilitate it, which mere endurance has not. In all 
large activities, even our best and our Christian, 
there is an ingredient of self-consciousness. All 



222 THREE GATES ON A SIDE, 

earthly holiness frays out into a fringe of conceit. 
But in suffering, in simply bearing there is no double 
of ourselves that adds itself to us in reenforcement. 
We are thrown back upon our own resources and 
upon the staying power of him who keepeth in 
perfect peace those whose mind is stayed on 
him. 

The hardest kind of endurance is that when the 
circumstances are such that there is no sort of ac- 
tivity into which the suffering can let itself out, and 
endurance is the only thing left. Pain, even physi- 
cal pain, is diminished, or at least covered up, by 
physical activity, and soldiers mortally wounded will 
sometimes fight through to the end of the battle be- 
fore they are apprised of their injury. In action 
there is a narcotizing effect, and deed gives escape to 
pain, something as tears help to wash away sorrow. 
So when our feelings have been injured we do not 
retaliate because of our heroism or because our 
dignity needs to be avenged ; we retaliate because it 
is easier to retaliate than not to ; not because of our 
heroism but our lack of it — as water near the edge 
of the sea breaks into foam and spray, not because 
there is so much water, but so little. And after all 
it is fully as much the little aggravations that it is 
hard to get along with quietly and enduringly as it 
is aggravations that are larger and more conspicuous. 
A great strain we anticipate, and get ourselves 
measurably adjusted to before it overtakes us; but 



DEFENSIVE ARMOR, 223 

small exasperations are like gnats, you feel the sting 
before you see the gnat, and then it is too late. 

This explains why it is that it is so much easier to 
be saintly in large and public places than it is at 
home, no matter how paradisaic the home may 
be. About public Christianity there is an element 
of dress parade. We keep our scouts out and our- 
selves well in hand. Clerical piety is not to be 
gauged by the services of the pulpit, nor the piety 
of elders and deacons by the performances of the 
conference room. To use a technical phrase, men 
are spiritually " gotten up " for those occasions. A 
man's Christian measure is to be taken when he is at 
his average and when his condition is due to the 
ordinary stress of the Lord, and not to the excep- 
tional strain of circumstances. 

When our thought is upon inconspicuous holiness 
there opens before us a large area of medita- 
tion. We estimate people upon the basis of their 
achievements. We ask, " What have they done?" 
We erect monuments to perpetuate the memory of 
their discoveries, their exploits, the battles they 
have won. Hence it comes about that many men 
but very few women are monumented. But human 
worth, like the Lord's worth, is to be tested by the 
simple power of sweet endurance, patiently standing 
in one's lot to the end of the days. In the sphere 
of feminine experience there is ordinarily very little 
that is overwhelmingly stimulating. The feminine 



224 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

life, if it be truly feminine, is usually quietly lived, 
with none of that incentive that makes great, toil- 
some achievement easy to members of the other 
sex. Society will rise no higher than the home, and 
the measure of the home is the mother. In the last 
anaylsis the world's downward pressure is sustained 
by woman — and more than the public generally sus- 
pects, the man's talent for achievement is supported 
by the wife's and the mother's genius for quiet, con- 
tinuous, patient endurance. 

Only one word more, and that is a message I 
would love to have you take to any member in your 
households who is laid one side, any one who by 
infirmity of disease or of years is past the point of 
active usefulness, and whose only province is now to 
wait and to be patient. Say to them that the power 
to endure is greater than the power to do. Say to 
them that in their case, as in that of the Lord, it is 
not so much action as it is suffering that ripens the 
soul and makes it heir to the heavenly promises. 
And say to them, moreover, that it. was by an expe- 
rience kindred to theirs, in the exercise of patience 
rather than in the performance of work, that the 
Lord attested his divineness and fulfilled his 
heavenly commission. 

The Lord take care of all our aged and sick ones 
and foster them by the comforts of his spirit and 
grace. May it be our disposition not so much to 
pray that we may be mighty in word and deed as 



DEFENSIVE ARMOR. 225 

that we may be mighty in our power to bear and 
endure ; that whether we have the sword put in our 
hand to wield or not, we may at any rate be 
equipped with the girdle, the breastplate, the san- 
dals, the helmet and the shield. "And may the 
God of all grace who hath called us unto his eternal 
glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a 
while, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle 
you. To him be glory and dominion forever and 
ever, Amen !" 



XVI 



Whom God Hath Raised £//, Having Loosed the 
Pains of Death ; Because It Was Not Possible 
That He Should Be Holden of It. — Acts ii:24. 

EAD, and yet not able to continue dead. A 
stone sepulcher, and yet not equal to the strain 
of the strange body that was entombed in it. "Not 
possible" that he should be holden of it. It is just 
that " not possible " that we are going to think 
about and be glad over this morning.* 

The world has never made a great deal of the resur- 
rection of Lazarus, or of the widow's son of Nain, or 
the ruler's daughter or the Shunamite's son. There 
are two kinds of resurrection ; there is a natural res- 
urrection and there is an artificial resurrection. Some- 
thing as there are two kinds of waking up from sleep ; 
one is waking up because something has roused you ; 
the other is waking up because you have had your 
sleep out. Something roused Lazarus. Elisha roused 
the Shunamite's son. Jesus has had his death-sleep out. 
Artifice versus nature. It never could have been 



* Preached on Easter Sunday. 



CHRIST STILL ESCAPING, ETC. 227 

said of the ruler's daughter that God raised her up, 
loosing the pains of death because it was not possible 
that she should be holden of it. It was possible, 
most possible. One reason why the world has made 
so much more of Jesus' resurrection than of Lazarus' 
is because there is some appreciation of the broad 
difference between the two in this respect. In the 
rending of the Lord's sepulcher we are dealing with 
a distinct matter. It is an event on another plane. 
It is interesting how people will feel such a difference 
as this without ever having gone into the nice anat- 
omy of it. It almost seems as though out of pity 
for our slow-footed thinking faculties God had pro- 
vided us with a set of automatic powers that feel 
without going to the trouble of thinking. 

At any rate, people have never pinned their 
hope of immortality to Lazarus' resurrection, and 
they have to the Lord's. No one ever said that 
Lazarus brought life and immortality to light, and 
St. Paul did say that Christ brought life and im- 
mortality to light. And something of the core of 
the case lies in this particular clause we are upon : 
" Because it was not possible that he should be 
holden of it." We gain from Christ's instance a 
sense of resurrection power working from within 
outward ; in other instances, the sense of resurrec- 
tion power working from without inward. Here 
it is something indigenous. Here it is like the 
wheat-grain growing up out of the ground because 



228 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

there is intrinsic impulse making it grow up ; resur- 
rection inheres in its nature ; it is not possible 
that it should be holden ; rising is a part of its 
genius. 

The Lord's life was somehow in his own hands. 
It was singular language that, some time prior to his 
death, he used in speaking of his death, when he 
said : *{ I lay down my life, but I lay it down of 
myself. I have power to lay it down, and I 
have power to take it again." Under any vi- 
cissitude his life was such a thing that he kept his 
own hand upon it. His life was such a thing that 
limitations did not limit it ; obstructions were no 
embarrassment to it ; death was not fatal to it. 

Life under any circumstances, life of any kind is a 
wonderful thi-ng, spiritual life, animal life, yea, even 
vegetable life. We cannot say much about it, only 
wonder at it. No one can produce life. Science 
has as yet shown no first symptoms of being able to 
manufacture any living thing. Nor can science tell 
us anything about life. It can speak long and most 
interestingly of what life can do and how marvel- 
ously it can display itself, but when we come to the 
matter of life itself we are at the fascinating edge of 
an unknown world. So small a thing as a bit of live 
bud is the nigh shelving beach of an untraveled sea 
that has no farther shore short of the throne of God. 
In contemplating such matters thought gains an up- 
ward lift that never leaves it so long as it con- 



CHRIST STILL ESCAPING, ETC. 229 

tinues to be thought. An acorn lying, for months, 
still, brown and insensible, with a slight change of 
environment, begins to become dimly conscious of 
itself ; and waking up into a mighty tree that fills 
the air, greens and withers, and greens and withers 
while children grow old and generations pass away. 

And then there is something strange and thrilling 
in the way in which even vegetable life asserts itself, 
the cool and imperturbable sovereignty which it 
seems almost to feel over the inanimate world that 
raves and beats around it ; the way in which it will 
build its own fiber out of the bitter assaults of the 
storm ; the way in which it will break down into the 
privacy of the deep earth, convert the ground's ob- 
stinacy into the material of its own security, dispose 
its roots according to its own mighty will, plow into 
the rocks and wrench the seamed granite asunder at 
the pressure of the might of its own irresistible 
life-power. All of this is wonderful, and we can 
feel no surprise that the devout biologist bows with 
a kind of adoration before the living world, and finds 
in its revelations a Bible older than the Scriptures of 
Moses, whose pages he turns with a reverence that 
easily mounts up into worship. 

But then the most marvelous thing about it all is 
that this is only the first beginning of the matter; it 
is but the silvery edge of the lunar disk that is wait- 
ing to widen into the full moon. And it is so pass- 
ing strange that men can use these nigh wonders of 



230 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

this wonderful, living world to block and bar their 
passage into the realms beyond, instead of treading 
them as avenues conducting into fields of more liv- 
ing green, and nto the kingdom of God teeming 
with a more supernal life. It sometimes seems as 
though if this new, living world of ours had not 
been quite so wonderful men's thoughts might more 
easily have broken into the liberty of the air ; that 
less of verdure in the valleys would have driven 
them to search for the more brilliant flowers that 
wax and blossom upon the mountains ; and that had 
there been a little less sunshine on the ground, their 
eyes might more easily have lifted themselves to the 
light that brightens the stars. Blessed would we be 
if the nigh wonders and the vegetable miracles of 
each recurring Spring would serve us only as alpha- 
bet in which to spell out to our own thoughts and 
hearts the events that are afar, and the living pro- 
cesses of the growing years of God. 

It is a long way from the buried acorn cracking in 
the dark to the rending of the tomb of the Son of 
God in the morning twilight of the world's first 
Easter; and yet our thought to-day is upon the 
same feature in the two instances— the life element, 
vegetable in one, divine in the other, but working 
out with an easy expanse, shattering confinement by 
the native tension of its own energy ; with facile suf- 
ficiency disrupting its own confinement and crushing 
its own bonds. " It was not possible that he should 



CHRIST STILL ESCAPING, ETC. 231 

be holden of it." It seems to me we can almost see 
the very steps of the transaction, divine life in the 
grave unnerving the clasp of death and striving to 
fracture the meshes of fatality ; and all of that, not 
by virtue of extrinsic reinforcement, but out of the 
abundance of its own easy sufficiency, the exuber- 
ance of its irresistible fulness of divine life. 

Now all of that brings almost to our very senses, 
and almost to the touch of our fingers' ends, the 
event of divine resurrection which the great church 
catholic on earth, and I should not be surprised if in 
heaven too, to-day celebrates. But not only is there 
a great historic meaning in this resurrection emer- 
gence of Christ from the sepulcher, but it seems to 
me there is a vast parable meaning in it also ; that 
the divine life quietly mastering the power of death 
that Easter morning, easily breaking forth from the 
cold clasp of the rock grave into light, liberty and 
sunshine, is a picture in small of what divine life 
on earth is everywhere and always doing. 

That is the grand meaning of history, slow resur- 
rection of the divine life that is buried in it, and that 
every day strains a little more the gritty sepulcher 
it is entombed withal ; not because you and I try to 
drive into the enshrouding rock the wedges of our 
holy endeavor, not because liberating and resurrect- 
ing power is borne in upon it from any outward 
source ; but because of the strengthening tension 
and growing push of its own resistless life that is 



232 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

eternally destined to break loose from the confine- 
ment of death because it is not possible that it 
should be holden of it. All the sin that is in the 
world, and the apathy and the obstinacy, and the 
ignorance and the hopelessness, what is it but so 
much vast, cold granite tomb in which the immanent 
buried life of God is working itself forth day and 
night, century after century, as the dawn slowly red- 
dens toward the perfect glory of the full day and 
the ushered kingdom for whose coming we rev- 
erently pray. 

In the struggle of this entombed but waking and 
emerging life, we behold the secret of the convul- 
sions by which the centuries are rent ; the vast up- 
heavals by which strata of event are disorderedly piled; 
the profound chasms that are struck down into the 
solid depths of history. You remember the old le- 
gend, perhaps, which Virgil tells of Enceladus, the 
giant son of Titan, who was overwhelmed under 
Mount ^Etna, whose breath was interpreted by the 
poets to be the flames issuing from the volcano's 
mouth, and the tremors of the mountain and the 
quaking of the island of Sicily to be the struggles of 
the buried giant as he turned in his living grave and 
struggled toward liberty and resurrection. Oh ! in 
how many ways the divine spirit of all truth has 
been working through all the ages of the world 
and giving even pagan minds a presentiment and 
suspicion of the deep things of man and history of 



CHRIST STILL ESCAPING, ETC. 23? 

God ! And we only then begin to understand his- 
tory, or are in a temper to approach its contempla- 
tion, when we appreciate all the revelations, revo- 
lutions and vicissitudes of event as being the 
immanent breath of God become a brightness in the 
air, the moving of his confined Spirit and buried 
presence become a tremor among the years. As 
geologists delight to lay bare the rocks and track 
the pathway upon them worn by the archaic forces 
of fire and flood, so it seems to me there is no 
grander effort of which human mind in the range of 
immaterial things is capable, than to trace the move- 
ments of human history, considering those move- 
ments always as being steadily marshaled by the 
generalship of God's ordering spirit, and every ad- 
vance toward freer living, truer thinking, sweeter 
acting and holier worshipping as being one more 
blow with which the rising Lord of life strikes the 
grim casing of his tomb, and shatters himself a path- 
way out into the light and splendor of the world's 
final Easter. 

Think again of this same confined Spirit of God, 
as struggling in quiet resurrection against the bar- 
riers of sin, ignorance and prejudice that hinder the 
evangelization of the world. Remembering how the 
claims of the Gospel cut directly athwart the stal- 
wart passions of every human heart, I cannot under- 
stand how any man, with a mind that is appreciative, 
and that has a grasp upon the history of the victor- 



234 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

ies achieved by the cross, can escape the conclusion 
of a God-Spirit striving in the midst of it all, and 
rending its way out like an entombed Jesus breaking 
forth into the light and liberty of full resurrection. 
There is no argument for the divineness of Christian- 
ity like the steady, irresistible, onward march of 
Christianity. And it has been so from the first. 
There is not an obstruction conceivable by man or 
devil that has not been flung down against the river 
of life to dam its flow. And still its currents of 
cleansing and irrigation are diffusing themselves 
throughout the total area of our globe, never so rap- 
idly as now ; and hardly a month goes by but some 
new language or dialect is made to human minds the 
vehicle of the blessed story. 

With what wonderful persuasion of divineness 
would all this work upon our minds and upon every 
mind, if we, standing at some distant planetary out- 
look, could thence have watched the gradual widen- 
ing and lengthening of the band of Gospel light 
from the old Jerusalem days forward, the slowly 
broadening sea of evangelization, creeping steadily 
higher along all its coasts, beating against one grim 
headland after another of enmity and vice, island- 
ing the higher and higher hills and then submerg- 
ing them ; sending forth friths that prolonged the 
deepening waters out among cruel and pagan wastes ; 
every new century and almost every new year, 
testifying by its expanding coastline to the absolute 



CHRIST STILL ESCAPING, ETC. 235 

inexhaustibleness of its fountain of supply. It is 
the same thing over again, a sepulcher entombing a 
waking divine Lord, and it was not possible that he 
should be holden of it ; antagonism compacted to 
granitic hardness ; sin rolled as a stone against the 
door of the sepulcher and sealed with malignity and 
cruelty; cunning posted as a watch upon it. But 
the night is going by, it is a divine presence that is 
straining at the grave clothes and struggling out 
from entombment, and every new tribe that has the 
Gospel brought to it, every new island out in mid- 
ocean that is vocal to-day with Easter praises, every 
new dialect that this April spells out " Resurrection " 
to the wondering eye of the untaught pagan, is one 
more bond burst from the nail-pierced hands and 
one more blow with which the rising Lord of life 
strikes the grim casing of his tomb and shatters 
himself a pathway out into the light and splendor of 
the great world's Easter. 

And then, again, an imprisoned divine Lord is 
struggling to full resurrection within the entombing 
religion of the world. One of the unappreciated 
marvels of our very Bible is the way in which, from 
the beginning of it to the end, it marks the steady 
rise of that current of divine truth which it channels. 
There is not a greater mistake made, nor a sadder 
one, than the habit of treating the Bible as a dead 
level of divine revelation. Its first lessons are but 
the seed-corn out of which, through the successive 



23G THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

seasons of four thousand years, the primary germ 
has been unfolding into to-day's blossomed and 
fruited Tree of Life. It was a divine thing then ; 
divine in its inception as it is in its finish; just as 
the confined germ is as live a thing as the great air- 
filling elm after a growth of two hundred years. 
But away back there it was a divine thing perpetually 
striving and struggling forth into unsepulchered life 
against the constraints and confinements that 
human small-mindedness and false-heartedness put 
upon it. Divine, but divineness bandaged ! Eternal 
spirit, but eternal spirit in a vault. Four thousand 
years of resurrection in the domain of truth ! The 
Word which in the beginning was with God and 
was God, breaking off year by year and century by 
century the coarse integuments of human stupidity 
and carnality with which, forsooth, even divineness 
requires to come into the world encased. 

Yes, if we had an eye at once analytic and com- 
prehensive we could almost count the year-marks of 
growth in our blessed old Bible, as we can count the 
rings in the cross-section of a century oak. Not 
that the divine mind, to be sure, is growing, but by 
dint of the irresistibleness of its expansive power, it 
is steadily breaking through the limitations of 
human thought that overspread it, and becoming an 
open and realized presence of light in the midst of 
the firmament, like the great sun perforating and 
stealthily dissipating and at last breaking through 



CHRIST STILL ESCAPING, ETC. 237 

the cloud, and making all the air bright and carpet- 
ing all the ground with sunshine. And the long 
struggle goes forward and the slow resurrection pro- 
ceeds ; but rock is no impediment to a divine body 
struggling to be free, nor man's error any embarrass- 
ment to the intense, vital germ of the divine spirit 
of truth ; and each false hope shaken off, each small 
opinion broken, is one more bond burst from the 
nail-pierced hands, and one more blow with which 
the rising Lord of life strikes the grim casing of his 
tomb, and shatters himself a pathway out into the 
light and splendor of the great world's final Easter. 

The Lord, too, is sepulchered, and has always 
been most gloomily sepulchered, in the theology of 
his church. To disparage theology is to forget the 
divine spirit of truth which the pettiness and faulti- 
ness of human conception encases ; and to ignore or 
lightly to pass over the history of theologic thought 
for the past forty centuries is to be oblivious of the 
slow, steady process of resurrection through which 
the confined spirit of God is straining and crushing, 
age by age, the tough integument by which he is so 
jealously guarded, the tomb of petrified opinion 
around which his lovers keep tearful vigil, and to 
which in the gray light of the early morning they 
gather with linen bandages and spices " as the man- 
ner of the Jews is to bury." 

All the old and later hard-fought battles on the 
arena of theologic thought win dignity, yea even sub- 



238 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

limity, so soon as you conceive the real personnel of 
the lusty duel. It is not one set of small human 
opinions arrayed against another set of small human 
opinions. It is not man against man. It is truth 
against error ; it is the eternal against the temporal ; 
it is the whole against the partial ; it is the Infinite 
shaking itself free from the encompassing meshes of 
the finite ; it is the waking Lord chafing against his 
prison house, the rising Lord rending his sepulcher, 
because it was not possible that he should be holden 
of it. Hence the continual sense of victory there is 
in such theological strife. You think it is you that 
are making history, and your words that are a light 
in the air and a tremor along the ground. No, the 
great Titan is breathing under ^Etna, and the quak- 
ing of Sicily is the struggle of Enceladus. The 
echoes are the blows of the Lord of Life; the ruins 
are fresh fragments of his wrenched and crumbling 
sepulcher, and every theological battle well fought 
through to the end is another stage in the resurrec- 
tion history of the entombed Christ, swelling pre- 
lude to the final consummating Easter-tide. Theo- 
logical controversy thus, so far as it is the cracking 
away of archaeological deposit and dogmatic stratifi- 
cation is but the emergence of the God-Spirit into 
freer air and wider liberty, and therefore can no 
more be stamped out or whistled down by a dog- 
matic constabulary than you could stop the growth 
of a California pine by girdling its trunk with cotton 



CHRIST STILL RSCAPING, ETC. 230 

yarn, or than the resurrection of the Son of God at 
Jerusalem could have been delayed by piling more 
granite upon the roof of the sepulcher or posting 
more Roman police at its door. 

And then, just in a word, the irrepressible Lord of 
Life is immured and struggling inside the ethics of 
the world. There is nothing in the history of the 
human race more calculated to amaze us than its 
improvement in morals; especially when you re- 
member that every step of such improvement is 
taken in the teeth of every man's native tendency 
and original passion. Xo man ever becomes better 
except as he has divine power given him to trample 
on himself. And to deny that there has been moral 
improvement is to be ignorant of history or to give 
the lie to history. 

We become strangely oblivious of iniquity that 
transpired more than ten years ago, and so have lit- 
tle sense of the steady trend of moral advance. Old 
crime becomes in time almost luminous, as distant 
sewage waxes radiant. I really believe that the 
vices of what we call the good men of olden times 
we cherish almost as warmly as we do their virtues. 
Present iniquity is the only iniquity that seems to us 
thoroughly iniquitous. Therefore, one of the ea- 
siest views, even as it is the most supremely false, is 
that morals are hardly holding their own. Why, we 
preach about Jacob and we apostrophize old Abra- 
ham ; but the cool unbedizened truth of the matter 



240 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

is that there is not one of the choicest of the saints 
of the patriarchal age that would be tolerated in 
modern times outside of Sing-Sing or Blackwell's 
Island. That is nothing against the patriarchs. 
They are to be judged by their times, not by our 
times. As I say, it is all of it a growth ; and the 
hindered, entombed, struggling life of the Lord is the 
divine sap that permeates that growth. 

History from the beginning of it to the end of it, 
is all resurrection ; the straining, tenser and tenser 
straining, of the immured life of God in the world. 
Here is our hope. Here is the ground of our confi- 
dence. Here is the material of our own little en- 
deavor. We praise God for the irrepressible and 
irresistible life that is in his son Jesus Christ. We 
celebrate the empty grave with songs of loud ac- 
claim. We decorate the vacant sepulcher with the 
perfumed beauty of blossomed flowers. But while 
in this we are memorially celebrating the past, we 
would also, O God, by the same act anticipate and 
celebrate that greater coming Easter-tide, when 
every bandage that human pettiness and ignorance 
wind about our risen Lord shall be sundered, when 
the whole sepulcher of world-sin in which he is yet 
entombed shall be rent, and the Lord of Life move 
forth a free Lord over a free earth — a glorified 
Lord in the midst of a redeemed world. 



XVII 

******** 

Verily, Verily, I Say Unto Tou, He that Heareth 
My Word and Believeth Him that Sent Me 
Hath Eternal Life. — John v:2Jf. 

HE wide reach of this passage only makes it the 
more necessary that in our attempts to under- 
stand it, our words should be small and our thoughts 
exceeding simple ; just as the steeper the mountain 
we are climbing, so much the shorter and quieter re- 
quire to be the steps taken in its ascent. 

He that heareth my word and believeth him that 
sent me hath eternal life. For the purpose of our 
study a verse has been designedly selected that 
makes eternal life a matter of the present. I sup- 
pose that in our common thinking the temporal and 
eternal are not only opposed to each other, but are 
so thought of as though the temporal is what lies 
near to us in point of time, and the eternal that which 
comes afterward and stretches out interminably and 
invisibly into the ages beyond ; something as the 
water, which lies close to land and that slides up on 
to the beach when the tide comes in, we call the bay, 
and only that which lies farther out beyond the 

(241) 



242 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

touch of the continent and the ken of the eye is 
named by us the ocean. The eternal stands to us in 
general for the ages which are untraveled and still 
out of sight ; somewhat as the spaces that lie out 
among the stars are called celestial, not because they 
differ from the terrestrial space that is immediately 
around our own globe, but because they are so far 
away. When we glance from the mountains to the 
stars we are conscious of a change simply in the di- 
rection of our vision. When we think from the tem- 
poral to the eternal we are conscious of much the 
same change in the angle of our thought: and when 
we speak of going into the eternal world it is not 
likely that we think of anything that is now, but only 
of some infinite bye-and-bye, that will not come till 
"now" is quite finished and vanished. 

If, therefore, we are not accustomed to the idea, it 
is with something of surprise that we are overtaken 
by these words of our Lord, who contradicts the cur- 
rent conception of the matter; who conjugates the 
eternal in the present tense, and makes the life eter- 
nal to be a possibility of the instant. Verily, verily, 
I say unto you, he that heareth my word arid be- 
lieveth him that sent me hath eternal life. 

There is considerable here that will not only be of 
interest to us in our attempts to think correctly, but 
that will certainly minister to us in our desires to live 
a richer, stronger and fuller life. 

We can conceive of a man with an imagination so 



ETERNAL LIFE. 243 

comprehensive and vivid that while lying out in his 
little row-boat ; hard by the shore, with its keel scour- 
ing the yellow sand, and beating the shoaling bottom 
with each new incoming wave, and his own view con- 
fined to the little land-locked inlet in which he hap- 
pens to lie drifting, nevertheless could realize the 
oneness of that inlet with the wide outside sea into 
which it opens, and feel himself to be indeed upon 
the sea, even while his boat is hardly off the rocks or 
clear of the reeds that fringe its margin. It would 
likewise be easy to imagine an astronomer who 
looked with an eye so broad and containing that our 
own globe as well as the sun, Sirius and Alcyone, 
should be felt to be included in the one great uni- 
verse, and even the very hill upon which his obser- 
vatory is built and his telescope swung, be realized 
to be part of the celestial world. And in something 
the same way, if only free play be given to our 
thoughts, may we find growing up in our minds a 
sense of the times that are everlasting, and learn to 
feel the oneness of our own years with all the years 
that have been, and that are coming, and appreciate 
that however near we lie to the shore, however shal- 
low the tide upon which we are floating, and how- 
ever land-locked the little inlet upon which we are 
upborne, nevertheless even these waters are continu- 
ous with the sea that lies outside the bar, are swept 
by the winds that come in from the distances, swell 
with the tide that rolls in from the depths, and that 



244 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

the years that we live, and the moments among 
which we move, are to the mind of God part and 
parcel of that great everlasting that makes this year 
kindred with the long years that are gone, and the 
vast ages that are to come. 

While all that view of the case is expansive and 
lends a meaning and a solemnity to the times 
through which we are passing, we are not even yet 
come to the best and truest part of our matter. For 
in dealing with the everlasting, as we have just now 
done, we have not quite touched the eternal. There 
belongs to the " eternal " a quality that the " everlast- 
ing" knows nothing of. The revisers have replaced 
" everlasting " in the old reading of our text by " eter- 
nal" in the new reading. The difference between 
the two is important, and we shall have no difficulty 
in seeing what that difference is. 

Let your imagination, if you please, paint for you 
the picture of a river slipping down its channel in 
continuous flow, rushing forward with impetuous cur- 
rent in the spring when the snows are melting and 
the mountains are full of water, but contracting its 
volume and retarding its pace in the heat and 
drought of summer: and alongside the river, with its 
base laved by the river's flow, a mountain sloping up 
overshadowingly in massiveness and silent unchange- 
ableness. Now those two features in your fancy-pict- 
ure will each leave upon you its own peculiar im- 
pression. One of them is an affair of times and 



ETERNAL LIFE. 245 

seasons ; the river will obey the calendar and keep 
step with the almanac. Very likely a system of ter- 
races, left behind upon the subsidence of the river, 
will put you thinking upon the history of the river 
in ages and centuries antecedent. All this matter of 
rise and fall and contraction and velocity is full of 
the time element ; it reduces to days and seasons 
and years. Then you look away from the flowing 
river to the still mountain. You stop counting. 
You close your almanac. Years and centuries seem 
all at once a little out of place. The seasons and the 
generations seem to slip across the mountain, and to 
slide over it with no more effect than the mists that 
gather in its folds and lie along its slopes and then are 
dissipated. It seems to have nothing to do with time 
— to belong to a different world from that in which 
watches tick and clocks strike. Even inspired mind 
seemed to feel it so, and we read in Scripture about 
the eternal mountains, not simply the " everlasting" 
mountains, as it was in the old reading of Habakkuk, 
but the "eternal" mountains, as it stands in the new 
reading — the mountains viewed as something which 
rise up in the midst of the years, but to which the 
years have no relevance ; something that is in the 
midst of time and still is timeless, as Teneriffe with 
its Peak of Teyde stands out in the midst of the sea, 
but spires up 12,000 feet untouched by the sea, and 
in haughty indifference to the sea. 

Accustomed as we are to the limitations of time, 



246 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

and to a world whose experiences and activities are 
so largely calculated in terms of months and years, 
it is a vast thing for our souls to stand even imagin- 
atively upon the margin of a realm where time does 
not signify and where years do not come to mention. 
And we need not at all confine ourselves to the fan- 
cy-picture of river and mountain by which we have 
just tried to aid ourselves. There is much that comes 
to common expression and that makes out a large 
part of our experience, that is of the same timeless 
sort ; very much that it would never occur to us to 
date, and that it would indeed be absurd to think of 
dating. It is not an uncommon thing to speak of 
justice, for instance, as being eternal. We do not 
mean by that simply that justice has always been 
and will always be; we intend by it the deeper idea 
that justice is something that time and years have 
nothing to do with, just as affections cannot be 
weighed in scales, nor thoughts computed in inches. 
Just as the drifting mists do not alter the mountains 
so the drifting years do not alter righteousness and 
justice. They have nothing in common ; they belong 
to realms that are distinct. 

So of love and mercy and long-suffering and pa- 
tience,you could never put a tag upon any one of them 
to designate their date or age or birthday, any more 
than you could put a train of logic on a railway track, 
or raise a suspicion with a windlass. All of these — 
love, holiness, beauty, truth and the like are eternal ; 



ETERNAL LIFE. 247 



but, as you see, they are not eternal because they 
last so many years, but because they are of such a 
kind that the years have nothing to do with them ; 
they neither come with the years nor go with the 
years nor age with the years ; they have their being 
independently of all considerations or influence of 
time, and would continue to be though time were 
to stop, and existed already before the years began. 
The eternal, then, is not a thing to be referred to 
the future and thought of as something that will 
come, or that we shall come to, when the years that 
compose the present are past and gone. It denotes 
rather a realm which embraces all those energies and 
principles which, to be sure, have their being in the 
midst of the years, but independently of the years, 
and which form the framework to which whatever is 
historic and evanescent in nature and history is ap- 
pointed to attach itself. The eternal world, then, not 
succeeds the temporal world but underlies it, suffuses 
it. It is a silent and massive reality to-day as much 
as it w r ill be a million years from to-day: and, as we 
have seen, contributions from this realm are contin- 
ually being made to our own life and experience. 
We are having constantly to do with matters that we 
feel have pertaining to them no element of time and 
no ingredient of perishableness. It is a beautiful thing 
to be merciful and forgiving, and it never occurs to 
us to inquire how old the beauty of such demeanor 
is. It is the flashing up into our eye of a light that 



248 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

beams from a realm wherein we are living, indeed, but 
whose processes are not marked with those designa- 
tions of young and old, new and antiquated, that dis- 
tinguish the lapse of events, the outflowering of the 
trees, or the pulse-beats of our hearts. 

It would take a great while to enumerate all the 
respects in which the timeless realm we know as the 
eternal breaks gently through into the region of our 
temporal life and gives to it more than a temporal 
and evanescent significance; all those suggestions of 
beauty, those intimations of priceless worth, of truth 
that abides, however numerously and swiftly the 
years sweep past it, of goodness and holiness that 
mount up in divine steadfastness against which the 
centuries unavailingly beat themselves, as the waves 
dash themselves fruitlessly against walls of impertur- 
bable granite. 

And it is worth more than gold or science to know, 
and in our inmost hearts to feel that we are created 
into relations of kinship with this unseen world 
that abides in still stability beneath the shows of 
things, this timeless world that is neither borne upon 
the tide of the years nor worn by their abrasion. 

There is a good deal more than inspiration in it. 
If a man is drifting down the rapids, and his boat is 
being driven by the imperious stress of a pursuing 
tide, it is a good deal more than an inspiration to feel 
that boat caught by the giant interposition of a rock 
that rises up stanch and unswerving from out the 



ETERNAL LIFE. 249 

fevered and seething waters. It is not only inspira- 
tion, it may be rescue. We are afloat upon the wild 
and slumberless current of the months and the years, 
and it is salvation the way in which the great time- 
less, eternal world, that underlies the tide, sends up 
through the pitiless rapids secure shafts of rescue 
against which we can guide our boat, and to which 
we can anchor it. We feel to praise the Lord that 
there is something in our own bosoms that responds 
to the hints and communications that come to us 
from out that realm whose energies and processes 
know no succession of season, and no distinction of 
times; that the possibilities of the eternal are so 
within us, that we can answer to its suggestions and 
be made eternal by conference with what is eternal. 
In whatever relations we stand, if we are going to 
grow we have got to grow by feeding upon our en- 
vironment. If in any respect we are going to be- 
come in fact what we are in possibility, it must be by 
the appropriation of nutriment that is germane. The 
germ that is wrapped up in the acorn does not be- 
come oak except by the appropriation to itself of ma- 
terial that is fitted to make oaken fiber. Our own phys- 
ical growth is conditioned by physical assimilation. 
Endowed with the instinct of intelligence if we are 
going to become intelligent beings and personal em- 
bodiments of the truth, it is conference with the truth 
and assimilation of the truth, that is the only means 
of making us so. In every respect we become that 



250 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

which we feed upon. As artists, whatever germinal 
impulse beauty-wards we may be endowed withal, 
our growth as discerners of thebeautiful and produ- 
cers of the beautiful, will come only by contemplation 
of the beautiful and communion with it. We are 
clearly upon the track of a safe and sure law here. 
We can trust the law to guide us clear out to the 
end of the kingdom of God, and say that if we want 
to be eternal we have got to become it by feeding 
on that which is eternal, knowing it, living in it, com- 
muning with it, growing upon it. 

Even on the human side there is a science of salva- 
tion as much as there is a science of art, or a science of 
physical growth. The cause has been harmed by the 
arbitrary ingredients that have become mixed with 
it. A man is not going to be eternal after he dies 
unless he is already eternal before he dies. To be 
eternal is to have become ourselves the personal em- 
bodiment of that which lies deeper than the years, 
and which, because the years did not bring it with 
them when they came, will have no power to carry it 
away with them when they go. To use our Lord's 
own illustration, it is to be built on rock that is so 
much deeper than the torrents from the mountain, 
and than the shifting sands along the water-course, 
that neither the coming of the rain nor the sloughing 
of the sand will plow down to rock-bottom. And yet 
that illustration, although coming from the Lord, de- 
notes far more in a mechanical than in a vital way 



E TERN A L LIFE. 251 

the real genius of this matter of eternal life and eter- 
nal growth : and when he had been with his disciples 
longer and had let them more deeply into the truth 
and substance of things, he left behind the illustra- 
tion of the house built upon the rock, and began to 
tell them how, if they would have begun in them a 
life that should stand fast and imperishable, whether 
amid the flowing or the ebbing of the years, they 
must win it by appropriating to themselves the eter- 
nal, assimilating it, growing upon it. 

Here fall into line all those utterances of our Lord 
wherein he represents himself as the bread of life : all 
those references to himself and to the truth and to 
the Holy Spirit of God as the media and material of 
life in his believers. In all of which he is dealing 
with the possibilities of the eternal that are in them, 
and seeking to make them eternal by supplying them 
with that nutriment of the eternal that is fitted to 
make them such. We become more and more eter- 
nal by conference and communion with what is eter- 
nal, even as we become wiser and wiser by intercourse 
with wisdom. 

It is at this distinct point that we begin to learn 
the real meaning and purpose of faith. Every little 
while I am told by one and another that he would 
like to believe this particular matter or that particu- 
lar matter in regard to the Bible or in regard to 
Christ or the future life; as though if his mind could 
only be brought intellectually to consent to it. the 



252 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

consummation would be reached and a great result 
achieved. And when there is so much intellectual 
fencing about specific matters of that sort going on, 
it is not strange that such an idea gets abroad. 
Being prepared to assent to this or that particular 
statement in regard to Christ, for example, is a very- 
distinct thing from faith. Faith is such a personal 
yielding of ourselves to another as brings us into liv- 
ing contact with another and so makes us recipient 
of what it lies within that other to confer. The child 
becomes like his father by faith in his father, because 
his faith is that inward surrender that makes him 
susceptible to every impression and communication 
that goes forth from his father. A picture of it is 
seen in the plastic wax submitting to the stamp of 
the seal ; in the susceptible petal yielding to the pen- 
ciling of the sun. It is sad to reflect how much of 
mistake, confusion and controversy have come into 
the church by calling intellectual assent faith, intel- 
lectual hesitancy infidelity, and slurring over that 
personal self-commitment which in its very nature is 
faith, and one grain of which is of more significance 
than a whole ton of intellectual affirmations. 

Faith is, then, first of all that personal attitude on 
our own part that holds us within reach of the con- 
veyances that are waiting to be made to us, and is 
the means of our eternal life because through it the 
eternal is made over to us, is assimilated by us, and 
becomes part of our own timeless and imperishable 



ETERNAL LIFE. 253 

self. So that we are eternal, not because God has 
arbitrarily decreed that we shall be, but because 
through the avenue of our faith-surrender he has con- 
veyed to us that which makes us such ; and it is ful- 
filled what the Lord said — " He that heareth my 
word and believeth him that sent me hath eternal 
life." 

And now let me say in a closing word, that 
whether we be in the church or out of it, we have 
got to be careful. If we want to be eternal after we 
die, we must be eternal before we die. We shall go 
out with the tide if we are the mere creatures of the 
tide. Our association is necessarily in considerable 
measure with the things that perish ; but if they 
make out the sum and substance of our being, then 
when they are gone we are gone, and we are wrecked 
when the boat is wrecked upon which we have taken 
passage. It is therefore our prayer that underneath 
this surface-world of form and change in which we 
act and move we may at the same time be living in 
an unseen world of things that abide, that neither 
come in nor go out with the years, the world of truth 
which is imperishable, the world of God and of the 
Word which was in the beginning with God, the 
world of eternal mind and thought and love and holi- 
ness, whether of God or his children, that so our 
years may be spent in strength and quietness, we 
have a continual sense of God's great undergirding, 
and of the immovable Rock upon which we stand 



254 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

and of the imperishable life of God that we enshrine, 
that when the tide of our own swift years shall ebb, 
we shall be able to feel that we have within us a life 
which the coming of the years did not bring, and 
which therefore their retreat cannot bear away, and 
so rest in assurance and rejoice in hope of the Glory 
of God. 




XVIII 

IP* ittttfttr gin ty&vt. 

******** 

For We Know in Part, and We Prophesy in Part; 
But When That Which Is Perfect Is Come, Then 
That Which Is in Part Shall Be Done Away. 
— First Corinthians, xiii :9, 10. 

E know in part." We wish we knew more. 
To appreciate the fact that we know but 
little and to understand some of the reasons why we 
know so little, will help us, I think, to be more pleas- 
antly reconciled to the fact of our own ignorance, 
will aid us also in the still more difficult matter of 
being resigned to the ignorance of other people, and 
will contribute to remove some of the obstacles that 
lie in the way of a completer knowledge on our own 
part and that of others, and so open for us a little 
more widely the door that conducts to that prospect- 
ive region, beheld by the Apostle, wherein we shall 
know even as also we are known. 

This reference of St. Paul to the unfinished con- 
dition of our knowledge we do not understand to be 
here alleged in criticism, but only to have been put 
forward as simple statement of a natural and neces- 
sary fact. It is no fault of ours that we cannot on a 

(255) 



256 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 



Winter's night look out and see the Southern Cross. 
The horizon comes in the wrong place for that. 
That constellation is not in sight, at least it is not in 
sight to us: it does not form part of the heavens as 
viewed from that region of earth where we live, and 
where we have good reasons for supposing that God 
intended us to live. If it had fallen to our lot to 
dwell in Patagonia or Cape Colony, why, then we 
should have lived under the blaze of the southern 
stars all the time, and it would then have been as 
impossible for us to make out the Great Bear and 
Cassiopea as it would be for us now, with all our 
astronomical appliances, to get a glimpse of Argo or 
the Centaur. 

The illustration just used sets out in the light two 
facts, not only the fact that no eye is able to 
see everything, but that other fact, that each eye 
has an outlook of its own natively belonging to it. 

Truth is like a fixed diamond ground down to a 
thousand facets, and you must shift your position in 
order to catch the particular flash from each in- 
dividual facet ; which is what in the matter of truth 
we do not do ; it is what in the matter of truth we 
cannot do. 

Geographically we can migrate from latitude to 
latitude, and from longitude to longitude ; topo- 
graphically we can skip from street to street and 
from avenue to boulevard ; but as regards truth, 
we can change neither our nationality nor our ad- 



Y/E KNOW IK PART 257 

dress ; truth is fixed, and we are born fixed in our 
relation to it. 

We are individually created into a specific angle 
with the truth. Truth individualizes itself to each 
eye and distributes itself around, making only min- 
ute donations of its secret, and a separate, specific 
donation to each. It is with us in this respect much 
as it is with objects in their relation to a sunbeam, 
where one sort of material will take hold of a sun- 
beam and pull the blue out of it ; another the green ; 
another the red, and so on through the entire bundle 
of color bound up in a white ray. 

Quite in the same way, each mind picks the par- 
ticular truth that is native to it. We are so far 
forth constitutionally limited. It is like living on 
the west side of the house ; if you live on the west 
side you cannot see the sun rise; if you live on the 
east side you cannot see it set. If we could have 
our choice it would be better if we lived in a room 
that faced every way and had windows all around ; 
but there is no choice. Because a particular truth 
(and of course it is religious truth that we are think- 
ing of just now especially), because a particular 
truth strikes directly into your eye, carrying with it, 
therefore, an irresistible appeal, it is no sign that it 
will tell with effect upon me or even come in sight 
of me. It is' the way we are made. It has its ad- 
vantages ; it works concentration ; some one aspect 
of truth we have power to take hold of and to feel 



258 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

keenly, whereas, with only the same amount of 
power distributed over the whole truth nothing 
would outline itself sharply to us and no keen, burn- 
ing sense of anything be wrought in us. By this 
method truth gets out into the air piecemeal, but it 
gets out into the air. It is the principle of the 
division of labor divinely set at work. It results in 
each man having his own little patch of truth to cul- 
tivate, and by that means he doubtless gets more 
produce on to the world's market than he would do 
if he had a whole hundred acre lot to cultivate scat- 
teringly. 

That ought to keep us steadily at work only on 
constructive lines, not destructive ones ; telling what 
little we do see squarely and know earnestly and in- 
timately ; and continuing to tell it and letting the 
rest go. For all I am never able to see it, the 
Southern Cross is just as brilliant a constellation as 
Orion. A star is not brilliant because I happen to 
stand where its glory pours direct into my eye ; it 
is brilliant because — it is brilliant. Exactly so it is 
of a truth ; it is true because it is true, not because 
my eye happens to lie in the range of the truths 
shining. If there is some reality that your mind 
looks right into and that therefore takes close, earn- 
est hold upon you, but that your Christian or theo- 
logical neighbor with a different natural outfit from 
yours has no sense of and no care for, it is not be- 
cause he is an ugly Christian or a theological idiot, 



WE KNOW IN PART. 259 

but because your little star does not happen to 
shine where he stands. People do not quarrel about 
the same thing, but about different things, and get 
mad all the same because they imagine it is the 
same thing. 

Bigotry is the name we are likely to give to the 
loyalty with which a man devotes himself to some 
particular aspect of truth that is not the same as- 
pect that we devote ourselves to. Everything is 
peculiar till you have seen it and gotten- used to it. 
The church could never dispense with what at dif- 
ferent points in its history has been counted as or- 
thodoxy, and just as little could it dispense with 
what at different points in its history have been 
counted as heresies. A heretic, not always, perhaps, 
but usually, is a man that is natively constructed at 
a new angle with the truth, so that his interior eye 
gets shone upon by a star that no one previously 
had ever caught shining. In that sense, orthodoxy 
always begins in heresy. Christ, when he came, was 
the most arrant heretic of history. Heresy is ortho- 
doxy in the bud ; and orthodoxy is heresy become 
acclimated. 

That, then, is one reason why our knowledge is 
only a partial knowledge. We are born with an eye 
that is graduated to some particular truth or to a 
few particular truths, and not with a vision that 
spreads itself with equal facility over all truths. 
It works harm, but on the whole is doubtless a 



260 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

good deal more advantageous than it is mischie- 
vous. 

Another reason for this same incompleteness of 
our knowledge lies in the fact that we allow the one 
particular bent that we are born with to assert a cer- 
tain despotism over us that tends to intensify by 
acquisition this same one-sidedness that is ours by 
nature. If, for example, there is some one particular 
truth of God's Word, or some special quality of thought 
in that Word, that we have a native bias for, we 
shall be almost certain to make that bias determine 
for us the portions of Scripture that we shall admit 
to our thought and our confidence. So that the one 
special appreciation that we have operates in a way 
to hinder our using means to develop new apprecia- 
tions, much as the one glowing constellation that is 
in the direct range of our vision will be almost cer- 
tain to prevent our scouring around to detect other 
constellations that are only imperfectly disclosed. 

In this way we have, probably, each of us, con- 
structed a little Bible of our own — have taken the 
whole spacious area of revealed truth and finished 
off from it, lathed and plastered, a little room for 
our private, particular occupancy, and in this way 
give pretty nearly exclusive attention to the nurs- 
ing of that one tendency in us that of all others least 
needs nursing. The same holds of other books as 
well as of the Bible. Look at the library of any 
Christian thinker, and you will be able in three min- 



WE KNOW IN PART. 261 

utes to determine what his theological bent is, for 
the books that he buys and reads will be the books 
whose authors think what he thinks. The very par- 
ticularity of his view operates to keep it narrow, and 
the books which nine times out of ten he will pur- 
chase will only be those that he can use as whet- 
stones upon which to whet his particularity down to 
a thinner edge. The thing we know and that we 
feel intensely gets between us and what we have less 
zest for, and it may be said of our interest in this 
particular what is true of a river running between 
the mountains, that the swifter it flows the narrower 
its channel. 

Then, too, it is a serious matter that the habit of 
thinking along some special line that is congenial to 
us, not only weakens our interest in truth lying upon 
other lines, but sometimes even impairs our power 
of appreciating truth lying upon other lines. Some 
of us are so statedly occupied and engrossed with 
the facts and events of free spirit as to be unable to 
interpret the meaning of facts that are physical or to 
find or to feel any significance in the testimony which 
physical science may bear to some doctrine of 
religion, whether for or against. 

Just as a creature needs a different bodily construc- 
tion to enable him to live and walk upon land from 
what he does to exist in water, so, to a certain de- 
gree, a different equipment is required to live and think 
in a region of spirit from what is required to adapt 



262 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

one to a world of matter ; and the more exclusively 
we are habituated to the former, the more awkward 
that very habituation will make us when we under- 
take to make any headway in the latter. That is 
one reason why the clergy have always been so unsus- 
ceptible to scientific appeal, and why the Church has 
never accepted a new theory upon physical matters 
as long as it was even respectable to deny it, and 
sometimes not till long after it had ceased to be re- 
spectable to deny it. Some of us use our scientific fac- 
ulties so little that they become aborted and we lose 
all power to appreciate scientific facts. And the con- 
verse of that is equally true. Our mental powers 
shape themselves to the element they deal with and 
work in, like a dyer who becomes stained with his 
own dye-stuffs. So a man may have such a natural 
aptitude, and not only that, but such a developed 
aptitude, for thinking along the straight lines of 
physical event as to be almost destitute of the in- 
tellectual means of discerning, and still less of appre- 
ciating a fact that is spiritual. Engrossment with 
scientific pursuits is therefore regularly an embar- 
rassment to religious conviction. 

It is not that there is an inherent antagonism be- 
tween science and religion ; the galaxy of brilliant 
names whose subscription to religious truth was and 
is as hearty as their devotement to scientific truth is 
cordial and their authority as priests of science is 
confessed and applauded, is ample to disprove 



WE KNOW IN PART. 263 

that ; but by failure to exercise spiritual faculties 
we lose spiritual power ; by never looking at a 
thing we get so that we cannot see it when we 
do look. 

That exactly is the peculiar difficulty that is reg- 
ularly experienced in the effort to bring to Jesus Christ 
a man whose exclusive training has been a scientific 
one. So that in these days, when there is being so 
strong a pressure brought to bear in behalf of those 
branches of knowledge that deal with matter only, 
as opposed to such as pertain to the domain of free 
personality — like the languages, literature, law and 
history — there is something for Christian parents 
and Christian educators to think about. If you want 
your boy to be a Christian, see to it that he gets his 
mind trained in those faculties that will especially 
be called in play in the discernment and appreciation 
of spiritual truth. There is no danger of knowing 
too much about the physical facts of our globe, but 
if the mind is fed on nothing but physical facts, 
pretty soon it will not care to have any spiritual 
facts shown to it, and a little later, it will have only 
a blind eye to look at them with even if it is shown 
them. That, then, is the second reason we specify 
why our knowledge is only partial; we keep it 
reigned in on a straight track; we are tyrannized 
over by the pettiness of our interest in the truth, and 
what little we have a bent or a fancy for knowing, 
discounts, in our esteem, any truth that we do not 



26 i THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

happen to know till it destroys both our interest in 
it and our capacity for it. 

A third reason for the unfinished condition of our 
knowledge is that by a deliberate act of our own will 
we veto the truth. We say to the truth, " I won't have 
you." Truth depends for its power upon the concur- 
rence of the mind as much as light depends for its 
power upon the concurrence of the eye. A truth com- 
ing to us always says to us, " By your leave." It knocks 
at the door and then stands outside waiting till some 
one comes and answers the knocker or the bell-pull. 
No man is likely to be persuaded against his will. 
There is a very true sense in which there is no force 
in an argument. If you want to saw wood, saw with 
the grain, not against it ; if you want to split rocks 
never swing your sledge till you have found a cleav- 
age crack to set your wedges up in. Persuading a 
man's mind does nothing towards persuading the 
man. Arguing with him will not do nearly as much 
toward starting a crack in him as some crack already 
in him will do toward letting in the argument and 
clinching it. You see it is the man that is the 
clincher and not the logic. You have seen a shoe- 
maker drive shoe-pegs ; if he undertook to drive in 
the peg before a place had been made for it by the 
awl, he would both bruise the boot-sole and splinter 
the peg; that is to say, he has to drive in the hole 
first. That is a picture of the way truth works; 
truth is modest and never goes in till it has been 



WE KNOW IN PART. 265 

asked in. Behold, I stand at the door and knock — 
is true of Christ and of his Gospel. We personally 
and individually decide just how much God's word 
shall do for us and how far it shall go with us. The 
preacher never drives it in ; we let it in ; we let it in 
just as far as we choose. We have exactly the same 
control over it that when standing at the water fau- 
cet in our dressing-room we have over the water irv 
the supply-pipes; we can let it run as long as we 
like and stop it the instant we get enough. 

If you could look around and inspect the interior 
auditory apparatus of the people that range them- 
selves in church in front of the Bible or in front of 
a sermon, you could tell just exactly where they 
had got their gauge set, and therefore how much use 
there was in reading from the Bible or sermonizing 
to them. Good hearing is a far more difficult art 
than good preaching. A sermon depends one-quar- 
ter on the pulpit and three-quarters on the pew. 
What a superb opportunity to preach Peter had 
when just before commencing, Cornelius, speaking 
in behalf of the congregation, said, u Now, therefore, 
we are all here present before God, to hear all things 
that are commanded thee of God." That was a call 
worth having ; an open road all the way from God 
to the heart ; no shut doors ; no blinds drawn ; no 
cottoh in their ears ; no consciences placarded " No 
Admittance ;" minds, hearts, consciences, wills, gauged 
to everything that was in the air. It is no wonder 



266 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

that ten verses farther along it is told us that even 
while Peter was at work in the pulpit the Holy 
Ghost fell upon the people in the pews. That is 
one of the things we should have supposed might 
have gone without telling. 

The human mind is a strange thing, and God's 
truth is another strange thing, and they work wonder- 
fully when once they get together, get so they touch. 
That is all that is wanted ; there is such rich, true 
soil in every heart that if a seed-kernel of truth and 
a bit of mellow loam once begin to mix, something 
is bound to happen. Christ had perfect confidence 
in the truth, and he had just as much confidence 
that when once the heart had taken the truth fairly 
in, something would come ol it ; the Parable of the 
Sower teaches that ; but it all hinges on the single 
matter of letting heart and truth absolutely touch, 
and there every man is his own master of the situa- 
tion. In that lies the helplessness of the truth 
and the helplessness of the preacher of the truth. 
Each man's destiny in this respect is in his own 
hands. It turns on eloquent hearing, not on 
eloquent preaching. The best and most determi- 
native part of every service is done before we get 
here, so far, at any rate, as relates to practical effects 
in our own lives. ' It may rain as hard as ever it did 
in the days of old Noah, but the rain will start no grass 
so long as the down-pour falls onto frozen ground. 
It will only slide off un-irrigatingly into the rivers 



WE KNOW IN PART. 267 

and roll away fruitlessly into the sea. The sky is 
for us as full of stars as we have eyes wherewith to 
behold, and the truth of God is for us wide, com- 
manding and resistless, just according to the width 
with which we deliberately open our eyes to behold 
it, just according to the tender sincerity with which we 
yield our hearts to receive its message and to do its 
behest. That, then, is the third reason why we fall so 
far short of a perfect knowledge ; we like an imper- 
fect one better, and, ostrich-like, get away from dan- 
ger by sticking our head in the sand. 

This third reason is a self-condemnatory one ; it 
will therefore be pleasanter to conclude briefly our 
discussion this morning by alluding to a fourth rea- 
son that has in it no quality of censure, and to say 
that there are certain elements of Christian knowl- 
edge that can come only with the years and indeed 
with the centuries. Experience is the only perfect 
teacher; we cannot learn beyond our years. We 
can of course crowd ourselves with facts, but that is 
not wisdom. We can store ourselves with the Bible 
but even that is not Christian maturity ; it is like 
book-knowledge in general as compared with that 
totally distinct kind of acquaintance that comes by 
friction with time and concrete events. Wisdom is 
gained by the process of somehow letting the 
threads of truth weave themselves into the tissue of 
our own life ; and therefore it is not a thing to be 
hurried any more than you can hurry the growing of 



268 THREE GATES OAT A SIDE. 

the corn, the ripening of the wine, the mellowing of 
the harp-string. The perfect violin has to have a 
great many airs played upon it before its resonance 
becomes perfect music. 

Even reading the Bible is very much like study- 
ing the geography of an untraveled country ; you 
will have to visit the country before ever you will 
quite understand what you have so painstakingly 
learned. Experience is expository ; the Bible illumi- 
nates us but we illuminate the Bible. We make the 
Bible ours by our becoming its. We do not under- 
stand the Publican until we have been on our knees by 
the side of the Publican. We do not begin to 
fathom the story of the Prodigal and the father of 
the Prodigal until we have been in the far country 
not only — and who of us has not — but until we have 
returned from that country and have known what it 
is to stand in restored and reconciled relations with 
that father. Is there any one of us who feels that 
he has more than merely begun to understand Paul's 
love-chapter, the Thirteenth of Corinthians? We 
read and perhaps with some flippancy talk about 
the sustaining grace of God ; but what do we know 
of God's sustaining grace except as we have cast our 
burden upon him, and how can we do that except as 
we have had some burden that we could cast upon 
him ? Some of you have had, some of you without 
doubt have not had. There is a great deal of the 
best part of Christian truth that is invisible in sun- 



WE KNOW IN PART. 260 

shine. It is like the stars in that respect, which do 
not come out and shine at their best till evening. 

The simple change, too, that comes with our 
steady departure from cnildhood and our approach 
toward years that are a good deal older brings us on- 
to a new side of some matters. Perhaps we have 
found out that life is not what we once thought it 
was going to be. Possibly the present is not quite 
so real as it used to be, and very likely the great 
future is growing upon us; as while we are still a 
long way out at sea, the distant land-haze begins to 
take form on the edge of the horizon and to become 
a very real presence quite before the sea-swell begins 
to quiet into the stillness of marginal water or the 
feathery portents of the coming continent to hover 
about our masts. One day I was looking at two 
large telescopic photographs of the moon, one taken 
when the moon was at its full, the other taken a 
week later. In the latter, some of the mountain 
slopes of the moon that showed dull and lusterless 
in the earlier view, came out bright and glowing, as 
in the meantime the sun had passed along to the 
point where it could illumine the evening slopes of 
the mountains. I remarked this to the dealer whose 
hair had been whitened by the years. u Yes," he 
said, very quietly, but quite cheerily, withal, " Yes, 
the lights are very differently arranged when you 
get into the last quarter." 

All of this is very truthfully as well as delicately 



270 THREE GATES ON A SIDE. 

told in the following stanzas with which you are 
many of you doubtless already familiar: 

"ROCK OF AGES." 

" Rock of Ages, cleft for me," 

Thoughtlessly the maiden sung ; 
Fell the words unconsciously 

From her girlish, gleeful tongue : 
Sang as iittle children sing ; 

Sang as sing the birds in June ; 
Fell the words like light leaves down 

On the current of the tune — 
" Rock of Ages, cleft for me, 
Let me hide myself in Thee." 

" Let me hide myself in Thee," 

Felt her soul no need to hide — 
Sweet the song as sweet could be, 

And she had no thought beside ; 
All the words unheedingly 

Fell from lips untouched by care, 
Dreaming not that they might be 

On some other lips a prayer — 
" Rock of Ages, cleft for me, 
Let me hide myself in Thee." 

" Rock of Ages, cleft for me," 

'Twas a woman sung them now, 
Pleadingly and prayerfully ; 

Every word her heart did know- 
Rose the song as storm-tossed bird 

Beats with weary wing the air, 
Every note with sorrow stirred, 

Every syllable a prayer — 
11 Rock of Ages, cleft for me, 
Let me hide myself in Thee." 



WE KNOW IN PART. 271 



" Rock of Ages, cleft for me," 

Lips grown aged sung the hymn, 
Trustingly and tenderly, 

Voice grown weak and eyes grown dim- 
" Let me hide myself in Thee." 

Trembling, though, the voice, and low 
Ran the sweet strain peacefully, 

Like a river in its flow ; 
Sang as only they can sing 

Who life's thorny path have pressed ; 
Sang as only they can sing 

Who behold the promised rest — ■ 
" Rock of Ages, cleft for me, 
Let me hide myself in. Thee." 

" Rock of Ages, cleft for me " — 

Sung above a coffin lid- 
Underneath, all restfully, 

All life's joys and sorrows hid ; 
Nevermore, O storm-tossed soul ! 

Nevermore from wind or tide, 
Nevermore from billow's roll 

Wilt thou need thyself to hide. 
Could the sightless, sunken eyes, 

Closed beneath the soft gray hair, 
Could the mute and stiffened lips 

Move again in pleading prayer, 
Still, aye still, the words would be- 
"Let me hide myself in Thee." 




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